Shadowman -- Prolouge
by Knyle Borealis
Summary: There's something sinister circling around 221B. First, Sherlock nearly gets blown up by one of his own experiments, and then John finds himself having one of the most disconcerting first impressions of his life. The stranger seems a mystery enough all alone, to John, but Sherlock's strange behavior and an uncomfortably familiar encounter with a bomber arouse his suspicions...
1. Prolouge

**A/N: Hello. This is Knyle Borealis, the author. I'm finally figuring out how to make friends with this site, so please bear with me if any of the formatting/structural stuff doesn't make sense. I'll keep editing.**

This is my First Fanfiction Ever. I love Sherlock and John with a passion that started back when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was the only authority on the subject (not meaning to exclude Jeremy Brett, Basil Rathbone, or any of those other wonderful people who brought my hero to life), and ever since my seven-year-old self picked up a volume of "A Study in Scarlet," I have been in love with the world of Sherlock Holmes.

It's not Brit-picked AT ALL, so I apologize. I welcome any feedback that you feel like giving, nice or no, so please comment!

**Disclaimer—****_none of this is mine!  
_Okay, well, a wee bit of it may be mine… (Blood, Sweat, and Tears included) but all of the good stuff definitely belongs to Doyle, Moffat, and Gatiss. I thank them greatly.**

I hope you enjoy it.

**Note: This is a Prologue! I'm just setting the scene, so if John and Sherlock don't show up yet, please don't be mad. They'll be here soon. **

* * *

She'd always thought that Hell would be brighter than it was there in the woods. The stern man at the church always said it would be. He always harped on about fire and brimstone, glaring right at her from the pulpit so that she shivered and huddled close to her mother's leg. Whatever brimstone was, she wasn't sure, but she knew fire. Fire was bright. Fire danced and rose nimbly into the sky, licking greedily over whatever it touched and sucking the color out of it, turning brown wood into black char so that its own flames could be fearsome reds and yellows. It burned and hurt at the touch, and it never, ever frightened her as much as the dark and cold and menace of the nighttime forest.

She wished that she were by a fire. Crouched shivering against the trunk of a large tree, she huddled with her knees tight to her chest, clasping her thin arms tightly around them. She was trying to be small, small enough that no one walking by could ever find her. The Shadowman couldn't catch her if he couldn't see her. _But what if he heard her?_ Like a hammer slamming against the inside of her chest, her heart battled noisily to break free of her small body, which felt far too frail in the face of the night's impassive cruelty. Her pulse was a thunder in her ears, and her breathing a whistling, ragged rasp in her throat. It was too loud. He would hear her.

She tried to make herself calm down, even pleaded aloud in a desperate whisper for her panic to go away. It didn't work. Her heart only pounded faster, louder. Sobbing in dismay, she clutched at her chest, terrified by the thudding, dissonant noise originating from the hollow inside her. But the thrumming beat under her fingers didn't match up with the cacophony in her ears. Stiffening in alarm, she scrambled up into a crouch on her toes, looking around wildly for the true source of the ruckus. It was behind her, back the way she'd come. _Running from the barn._ The noise was running from the barn? No, that was what _she_ was doing. What was the _noise_ doing? What _was_ it?

Footsteps. It was footsteps. The Shadowman's?

_Running after her_.

With a sob of terror, she tore away from the tree, kicking up patches of wet leaves and sticks behind her. He was too close. How could he have found her so fast? She had run so far. She went stumbling through patches of shrubbery and bracken that caught at her clothes. Their branches cut her skin like the rocks and sticks that bit into her raw, cold feet, so that she searched the shadowed surroundings with eyes that were blurred anew by tears. She had to get away. She had to find a better hiding place. If he caught her again, she would have to go back. Back to the barn.

Back to where he had killed her mother.

The thought was too much for her tired, tortured mind. A hoarse sound ripped out of her throat, one of pain and fear and anger and every other chaotic emotion that burned inside her. The tree in front of her didn't move like she'd hoped it would; she ran into its harsh, scraping bark and fell back. As she crashed into the wet debris underfoot, she was already scrabbling for a handhold to pull herself back up onto her feet. Finally, finally, a branch decided to be merciful and presented itself to her searching fingers. Latching onto it, she rolled over onto her stomach, hauled herself up with her handhold, and threw herself headlong into the gap between two trunks. Had she any breath left, she would have berated herself for her frightened stupidity. She shouldn't have screamed. He would hear her if she screamed. He would find her.

The darkness was too dangerous to run through. Branches swooped down to swat at her, rocks beat against her shins and sent her stumbling. It wouldn't stop her. Nothing could; she was driven on by something more than her terror. The last command that her tired, jumbled mind had comprehended still rang in her thoughts, spurring her on. _Run_. Her mother had told her to run, back when the sun had still been sinking and their small picnic had only just been interrupted by a glowing red bead of hatred. Back when she was blissfully unaware of the terrible stranger lurking in the shadows.

Suddenly, her life was full of new experiences, encounters with strange and horrifying things that she would give anything to forget. It had been a parade of never-befores for her. She had never seen her mother frightened before. She had never heard her start to pray aloud the way she had when the red bead found her leg, never heard her scream the way she screamed when its small, frightening presence suddenly exploded in a splash of red blood. Her mother had never before screamed for her daughter to run.

_Run_. Her mother had told her to _run_.

"_Run_, Mary!" she'd shrieked, her voice cracking in a ragged, broken cry that still tore at her insides with its raw desperation. "Hurry, baby, get away! _Run!_"

So she did. She turned and _ran_, into the woods, into the growing darkness. Leaving her mother behind her. _Why had she left her_?

Because her mother wanted her to get away.

It hadn't made any difference. She had run, as hard and far as she could, but he had found her anyway. The red bead had marked her just as it had her mother, and then her shoulder had blossomed with blood just the way that her mother's leg had. He had taken her then, while she was curled up and crying in the ground's freezing, wet leaves. Taken her back to the barn, where her mother had waited, trapped behind cold iron bars and bleeding into the straw that lay under her. The barn, where the dark of one night had merged into the blackness of another, and the Shadowman had taken away her last ray of light.

Her mother made up for all the screaming that she had never done. Her daughter made up for all the terror and pain and grief that a warm, loving parent had sheltered her from all her life. She'd thought that she was dead when she watched the Shadowman dragging her mother's lifeless body towards the door. It felt so awful deep inside of her that she was certain that she'd died and fallen into an eternal prison made of fire in brimstone. But she hadn't. She wasn't dead. Her heart was still beating, pounding inside her, like footsteps. Like her mother's voice, reminding her, commanding her to do as she'd been told.

_Run_.

And so, once again, she ran.

She ran, and ran, and ran, away from the Shadowman and into the cold, dark wet. Through the forest. Through her fear. Just running.

She would never run far enough.

He was close to her now, pounding through the forest, beating through the obstacles that held her back and sent her running in a drunken dance amongst the trees. She could hear his footsteps, his heavy breathing, and the metallic sound of clicking and rattling that had first made her mother wary during their picnic. Sobbing, she bent her head and ran faster, uncaring that the forest ripped her clothes and skin, unmindful of the blood running down her arms and legs or the dark bruises blooming under the skin where ever she had fallen. _Run_. The Shadowman was coming. She had to run. _But why?_ She could never escape him.

She _had_ to.

The cold air of the night bit into her skin, freezing the water that clung to her body and sharpening all the hurt. Shivers wracked her even as she ran, clattering her teeth together and making it difficult to control her own movements. She wished it was warm. She wished there were a fire. If only she were on fire. Then maybe her light would banish the darkness and send the Shadowman far, far away. He was so close now. The footsteps were right behind her, getting nearer every second. Their rhythm faltered as he took a longer stride, and air whistled past the back of her neck as his hand came within inches of grabbing her braid. Too close.

Nearly blind with her tears and fear, she cried out and hurtled to the right, taking a new tack off to the side. The running steps behind her skidded and slid on the wet leaves, trying to turn as she had without success. Desperate to distance herself from the monster who owned them, she left them behind. It was easier than it had been before to do so. The dark trees were kinder to her, suddenly. Less and less of them loomed up to knock her down, and the few that there were guarded the bracken close to their trunks, so that there was more space in between them through which she could fit. But the Shadowman could fit, too.

_Run_.

It was all she could do. The speed, the burning in her muscles, the perpetual forward sprint was part of her now. She had to run. Faster and faster through the thinning, night-cloaked trees, harder and harder despite the ache in her body that made every step into agony. The cold weighed down on her, and the pain in her shoulder and legs climbed with every second more that she spent defying it, but she could not stop. She had to keep running. A final tree appeared before her, and she veered around it, stumbling haphazardly over its roots. Behind her, a thudding, heavy tread drifted out of the forest, and her already leaping heart nearly jumped out of her chest.

The Shadowman again. He had found her already.

She hadn't run fast enough. She had to push herself harder. Catching her balance, she flew ahead, out into a vast, open space, through tall plants that pulled on her legs and whipped against her battered skin, depositing ice-cold droplets of moisture on her that only served to make her task harder. She'd made it to a farm field. Out of the woods. Relief poured through her, so strong that her body nearly went limp. The plants were bigger, softer than the forest floor. It wouldn't hurt too terribly badly to fall into them and give up. But no. The footsteps. The Shadowman. He was still behind her. She was still running, running, running. She couldn't collapse, not yet.

The field was wide and mostly flat, but without a moon to guide her, its furrows and dips were just as treacherous as the trees had been. Her feet, bleeding freely from uncountable cuts, made the footing slick. A large, flat rock was her undoing. She slipped in her own blood stepping down into a furrow, unable to find a foothold on its smooth surface. With a cry, she fell, bouncing off the rise of the dirt, smacking her head on a large stone and twisting her leg. A lancing pain shot through her from her knee, and the agony in her shoulder was also jarred when she tried to catch herself. Her head was ringing, her thoughts even more disoriented than they had been.

_Run_.

It hurt.

_Run_!

No, no. She couldn't. She tried to get up, but the pain sent starbursts of agony through her body. It was too much.

Her scream of torment and frustration turned into a shriek of terror when a large, dark body crashed down on top of hers. The Shadowman. Rough hands grabbed at her, taking a cruel fistful of her hair and closing with bruising force around the bloodied flesh of her upper arm. Oh, it hurt. It broke her, the pain. Her reeling mind burst into pieces under the burden of it, forgetting everything but her body's desire to get away, to be free of her fear and hurt. She struggled, lashed out at the monster holding her. His hard body was a brick wall against her tiny fists. His merciless fingers were blunted lightning where they dug into her flesh. It didn't matter. She fought him. Twisting, screaming, hitting.

She had forgotten that he was more than three times her size, impervious to her blows, and more than capable of killing her with his bare hands. Like he had killed her mother. She disregarded everything but her fear, her grief, and her rage. Trapped beneath his long, lean weight, she wriggled and hissed, biting the hand that sought to muffle her screams, digging her nails into the soft flesh of his face and neck—wherever she could reach. She hated him, hated the Shadowman with a passion that she had never before been capable of.

He'd made her stop running.

Somehow, beneath the sound of his heavy, ragged breathing and her outraged cries, her ears managed to hear something. There came another noise over the field, one that didn't belong to her or the monster she fought. A crash. A slam of wood on wood, like a door slamming shut. And then a light flooded the sky, bright and white and blinding in her dazzled eyes. With a cry of surprise, she squeezed her eyes shut and struck out once more, hoping that the light would hinder the Shadowman the way it hindered her. Praying that her blind blow could do some sort of damage to his equally blinded face.

Her fist met air. Her body shivered in the open air as the pressure that had been holding it to the Earth vanished and left it bare to the bitter night. Jerking in surprise, she snapped her eyes open. _Too bright._ Eyes closed. Eyes open—squinting them nearly shut. _Better_. Quivering with pent-up energy, she sat up, swaying as her head spun. A throbbing, heavy beat had settled in behind her right ear, but she ignored it and the sabers stabbing into her through her shoulder, staring around herself through her lashes at the empty field. She could barely see it, lit starkly in black and white as it was by the floodlights behind her. What little she could take in was wavering and uncertain, thanks to interference from the blow to her head. Only a few things truly made an impact on her whirling brain.

Light. Rows of crops. Wide open space.

And nothing.

Nothing else. No man, no monster in sight. She was alone. He was gone.

The Shadowman was gone.

_No_.

How? Where? Why? Trembling with confusion and adrenaline, she lurched to her feet, stumbling down the long divot in the dirt that had made her fall. He couldn't be gone. Where were his footsteps? He was chasing her. The Shadowman was chasing her. She had to run. _Run_. Running, she was running again. Running with painful, limping steps towards the darkness, stretching every instinct towards the blurred shadows at the edge of the brightness that had attacked her. Feeling the beat of her feet against the ground like the hammer of her pulse in her neck. Listening to the whistling, weeping roar of her breath in her lungs.

Listening to a voice, calling out behind her.

The shock that went through her was a cudgel to the backs of her knees. She fell onto them, squeaking as the one she had twisted protested, and saw the dirt rushing up to meet her face. Then it was there. Her nose hurt, and she'd hit her head again on another rock. Instead of cradling it, she lay still, tense in the dirt. Every one of her senses was on alert, stretching out behind her, searched the area for that strange, miraculous anomaly of sound. Not the light. Not the footsteps. Not the Shadowman.

The voice. It came again, loud and strident and worried.

It had gotten closer. Barely able to breath around the irrational panic closing up her throat, she rolled onto her back, pushing up onto the elbow that didn't hurt her too badly and gazing at the white and black blur of the fields behind her. After so much darkness, the light made no sense. After hearing hours of only her own sobbing and she and her mother's inarticulate screaming, words had ceased to have an effect on her brain. Only the voice gave her pause. Somehow, she knew it was a voice, journeying towards her, coming across the fields. A human voice.

Footsteps came with it. She tensed, ready to leap up and flee, but her body simply couldn't. The footsteps were methodical, steady. Not the Shadowman's panther-like tread. The voice was deep and lilting, like a hug from a warm, tall friend. The Shadowman had no voice. He had only his breathing, his low, deep breathing, the mysterious metallic clicking, and the awful, grating laugh that had haunted all the shadows of the barn. She was afraid of him. She was afraid of the noises that he made. She wasn't afraid of the voice and its footsteps. It wasn't the Shadowman. Not his footsteps, not his sounds. It wasn't him.

The Shadowman was gone.

With those words came a creeping, wilting sensation, like her insides were draining out of her back and into the dirt that she lay in. The voice was there. The Shadowman was not. He was gone. Gone, gone, _gone_.

_She'd gotten away_.

At the thought, the relief that had been sneaking up inside her rose up and hit her so hard that it felt like a bodily assault. Weakening to a point of boneless abandon, she slumped to the ground, her ringing head falling back to crush the stalks of a dew-covered plant. The water fell off its leaves, onto her face. It was cold. She hated the cold. It made her shiver, sapped her strength. Being cold was part of the darkness, part of the frosted knives that pierced her face under the dewdrops and under her tattered shirt where it was pressed against the hard, frozen ground. The furrow was greedy beneath her back, radiating its frozen poison into her body. Her whole world shook as the cold infected her muscles, overtaking them with spasms.

She wanted a fire.

The voice was nearer, more insistent than it had been. She heard the footsteps come closer with it, almost upon her, and felt a rise of some blazing, irrational feeling in her chest that pushed fresh tears out over her lashes. They trickled down tracks made previously in fear and pain, cleansing her cheeks and purging her crippled emotional state. Then the footsteps turned away, began to distance themselves from her. The blaze died, despair welled up, and fear reared its head inside her one last, desperate time. She parted her cracked lips, tasting saltwater and dirt. Her chest tightened, her throat worked to bypass the soreness that it had accumulated during her god-awful ordeal.

"H-h-h…H-h-hel…"

The voice rang out again. The footsteps returned.

Running.

Running towards _her_.

Lying there in the dirt, she shed tears of joy. They'd heard her; the footsteps and the voice had heard her. They came, tearing through the plants, revealing a pair of sturdy, large boots that turned into knees when their owner crashed down beside her. Then came the voice again, low, hurried, urgent. She didn't bother trying to understand. It wasn't the Shadowman. That was all she cared about. The cold was her main worry, the inexorable, festering _cold_. It ate at her, gnawing the way a great bit dog gnawed on a bone. Inescapable, that frozen feeling. She wished that it would stop.

Fingers.

The sudden touch on her arm surprised her, jolting her out of her miserable reverie. It wasn't _cold_. The hands that ran over her—brushing her hair back so tenderly from her dirtied face, touching the ragged edges of the hole in her upper sleeve so carefully—they weren't hard and mephitic like the nighttime Earth. They were far different. They countered her affliction, fought back the harsh tide dragging at her bones and jittering in her muscles. They were like fire. The voice was soft and reassuring. The arms that encircled her were strong, but eloquently gentle. Seeking to understand the miracle, her eyelids flickered, useless to ward off the overexposure that burned her retinas and haloed her shadowed savior in a pristine white glow.

She felt herself lifted up, cradled like a baby against a large, flat chest that was at once unyielding and supple. A sense of motion imposed upon her spinning head, and she let her forehead loll against one corded shoulder as she was carried off, deeper into the light. Weariness, bone-deep and leaden, settled into her. Her exhaustion was so great that it deadened her pain. Numb, her brain still twirled dizzily, so that she imagined seeing a bright red flash of flame when she glanced up at her rescuer's head. Flame and fire. Fire and flame. They had found her after all. The thought made her cautiously building contentment complete.

She was free. It was over. She was _safe_.

The fire had come for her.

No more running. Her fear ebbed entirely, and for that brief moment, her mind was too sluggish to even process where or who she was. She only knew that she could finally rest. Sleep pulled her eyelids down, and even the dull-but-still-present pain couldn't keep it at bay. Closing her eyes, she snuggled closer to the solidness and security that had wrapped itself around her. She had found her fire. Fire was free, fire was light. Fire burned in a body that was alive and vital, clad in clothes that smelled of soap, pine, and something intimately welcoming.

Fire was warm.


	2. Chapter 1

**A/N: Hello. This is Knyle Borealis, the author. I'm finally figuring out how to make friends with this site, so please bear with me if any of the formatting/structural stuff doesn't make sense. I'll keep editing.**

This is my First Fanfiction Ever. I love Sherlock and John with a passion that started back when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was the only authority on the subject (not meaning to exclude Jeremy Brett, Basil Rathbone, or any of those other wonderful people who brought my hero to life), and ever since my seven-year-old self picked up a volume of "A Study in Scarlet," I have been in love with the world of Sherlock Holmes.

It's not Brit-picked AT ALL, so I apologize. I welcome any feedback that you feel like giving, nice or no, so please comment!

**Disclaimer—****_none of this is mine! _Okay, well, a wee bit of it may be mine… (Blood, Sweat, and Tears included) but all of the good stuff definitely belongs to Doyle, Moffat, and Gatiss. I thank them greatly.**

I hope you enjoy it.

**Note: I realize that the "bored before a case" intro is over-used. I'm sorry. I just had a lot that I wanted to do later in the plot, and I couldn't get there until I put down some sort of a beginning. I'll see if I can come back and fix it later, once I've put down all my most pressing ideas.**

* * *

Stagnation was threatening in 221B. It hung, like an angry, buzzing cloud, over John Watson's head as he sat hunched in his favorite armchair, trying to type out an entry in his blog. It had been a miserable morning. Sherlock was in a black humor, and with his usual infectious flair, he had spread his disfavor over everything in sight until the flat was practically vibrating with his tense melancholia. John did his best to ignore the grumbling atmosphere; he was characteristically unsuccessful. Like usual, Sherlock overpowered all but the teacups with his mood swings.

There was nothing about the tall, whip-thin man that bespoke of patience or self-restraint. Rather than take a deep breath and attempt to crack on like the rest of the world when troubles arose, the brilliant, brooding man felt no need to mask his displeasure over certain obstacles, like his current state of affairs. Sherlock had hit a wall, something that only happened to him very, very rarely, and he was not taking it well. Since his tumultuous state of mind made him more than willing to lash out at any object of even passing interest, should it come, John was doing the best to be discreet. The brunt of the brunette's ire was directed inward for the moment, fortunately.

Still, the smaller, sandy-haired man was not immune to the hissing aura emitting from the great, frightening mental power that occupied the room with him. John could almost feel the invisible hornets in the air, whipping furiously over his skin. It was making him even more unsettled than he usually was when Sherlock was in a mood. Furtively, he glanced over at the couch. His flatmate's back greeted him, clad in a blue dressing gown and laying rather stiffly on the comfortable cushions. John managed not to roll his eyes at the familiar sight. It was no secret what was bothering the detective. He only wished that there was something that he could do about it to get the man out of his depression.

Sherlock needed a case.

It had been four days since Lestrade had sent them on their way from a murder scene, having watched bemusedly as Sherlock solved the latest crime only 10 minutes after his arrival on site. As the police were pulling the perpetrator out of the skip where he had been hiding (inside a broken refrigerator, one might add), John and Sherlock had turned towards home, and the time bomb that was Sherlock's patience had started ticking. Four days later, that little, persistent click in the back of John's mind had reached a fever pitch, and still a reprieve had yet to come. Impossibly, it seemed that all the gangs, thieves, and murderers with any bit of imagination in London had gone on holiday. It was just unnatural. While the rest of London was letting out a sigh of relief, Sherlock waited with bated breath for the next spot of mayhem.

Feeling a bit odd, John realized that he was waiting right along with him. Sherlock had been on pins and needles for too long. The good doctor was getting unnecessarily edgy, himself. If the current period of inaction didn't let up soon, there was no telling what his flatmate might do, and John didn't have the time or inclination to dodge bullets, evade explosions, or deal with the venom that Sherlock could lace even the most ingenuous of comments with when he was in such a foul temper. It had never taken so long for some sort of criminal activity to come along and spark Sherlock's interest. After four days of waiting, watching Sherlock's mood rapidly plummet into the dangerous regions of irritability and unpredictability that boredom induced in his powerful mind, he had even considering causing some mischief himself just to divert his friend's attention for a few minutes.

He didn't dare, though. When Sherlock was in such a state, there truly was no telling what sort of wrath that any well-meant act of helpfulness might incite. Even Mrs. Hudson had learned to tread carefully around the flat during such times. From past experience, John had learned to expect anything out of his flatmate during a "lull." On the first quiet day at Baker Street, John had surreptitiously locked his gun away in his desk drawer. On the second, he had been called home early from the surgery by his hysterical landlady. He'd basically sprinted across London to make it home, arriving at the flat to find half the living room blown over, a kitchen chair in smithereens, and splatters of what appeared to be blood all over the counters, thanks to one of Sherlock's rowdier experiments. He'd nearly had a heart attack until he spotted Sherlock sulking in a chair, and it had taken a full night of soothing and drinks to calm Mrs. Hudson, whose reaction to the debacle alternated between irate conniptions and terrified heart palpitations.

Day three had been a nervous affair, after that. Sherlock was a bloody mess when John had found him—literally and figuratively. The doctor had needed to bandage both of his friend's hands and also much of the detective's upper torso after treating him for chemical burns and minor lacerations. The damage done by the previous day's explosion would heal, in time, but the waiting period had the potential to be even more detrimental to John's unwilling patient's health than his injuries. With his arms and torso bound like a mummy, Sherlock could not conduct any more experiments. He could not text. It was impossible for him to play the violin. Thankfully, that meant he couldn't' handle a gun, either, or even pick the lock on John's desk in the first place, but John hadn't felt grateful for very long.

His inner relief had lasted all of two seconds, in fact. That was all the time it took for him to realize that without even a chance to occupy himself, Sherlock was in an inner free fall. His mind, so brilliant and overpowering when stimulated, was a rat's nest of horrors when left to its own devices. And Sherlock was trapped inside of it. He had been for nearly two whole days.

All things considered, Dr. John Watson was getting very nervous.

The clock in Mrs. Hudson's tiny sitting room chimed downstairs, faintly signaling the hour. Sherlock didn't move. He hadn't moved in ages. A glance at the clock on his laptop's monitor told John that it was four o'clock. The tall, svelte shadow weighting down the room to his right had lain prone on the couch since one in the afternoon the previous day. With a sigh, John rubbed his eyes and shook his head. He felt a flash of tired inner amusement at the situation. He'd been walking on eggshells for well over fifteen hours, and he had yet to think of it as terribly out of the ordinary. What a way to spend a weekend. Looking back in Sherlock's direction again, the doctor gave up on writing. His laptop snapped shut with a click, and John set the device aside with a small sigh.

He'd make tea. Going into the wreckage of the kitchen, John set about the familiar task with some deliberation, trying to block out everything but the simplicity of it. Try as he might, however, he couldn't quite ignore the rest of his surroundings. Sherlock's' gloom was a physical presence behind him, pressing coldly against the back of his neck. The dead quiet in the flat was driving him to distraction. Still, John knew better than to try and reel his flatmate into conversation. Pursing his lips, the doctor leaned against the counter and sipped his tea, careful not to burn himself on the hot liquid. He would go out, but he knew that his worries about Sherlock doing something foolish while he was away would only follow him wherever he went. Moreover, Sarah had been distant for weeks, too busy at work to step out with him or take calls.

He thought he'd seen her at a café two Wednesdays before while he was riding to a crime scene with Sherlock, chatting over a latte with a waitress. There was a second drink at the table, still steaming, but the opposite chair was pushed back, empty. The cab had moved on, then, without him being able to see who her companion was. John tried not to worry. Sarah had told him that her sister would be visiting that month from the country. In all likelihood, it was her drink and empty chair that he had seen. Something kept him from asking Sarah about it, though. It hung between them, his question, for the whole week, until it fell into the growing space in their relationship. Sarah made no move to acknowledge the rift. She hadn't even answered him when he'd texted to cancel their date the night before because he had to take care of Sherlock. Unsure of where he stood in that quarter, John was loath to push her for reasons.

Whether he liked it or not, that left him with very limited options. Stamford and the rest of his mates from school days, the army, and the clinic were well enough, but the hours John kept were irregular at best, what with his second career as one tempestuous detective's blogger and volunteer conscience. That part of his life at least had him seeing more of Lestrade than was usual for the rest of common Londoners. However, since the police were still without a case worthy of Sherlock's notice, there was no call for John and Greg to see each other for work. An off-duty visit was feasible, perhaps, but though Sherlock's schedule might have hit the rocks, the Detective Inspector still had plenty of cases on his plate.

He wasn't working that day, yet John didn't want to bother him in the middle of one of his few days off, especially when he knew how much energy Lestrade lost keeping up with his considerable workload. That didn't leave him many more people. There was Molly. She was all right, but…well, she was Molly. Giving his tea a tired look, John admitted that his list of friends could do with a bit of expanding. After Afghanistan, there hadn't been much chance for him to branch out, what with Sherlock coming in so abruptly and occupying such a huge part of his life. Not that he would have made many friends in his post-war state, anyway.

Thinking of his days as a soldier made his thoughts feel heavy and darker, so John pushed the topic away and admitted defeat rather than endure it. There was no helping it, it seemed. He was well and truly stuck in that flat without any company but Sherlock. Even the surgery was off limits—it was his first day off of the weekend. The prospect of spending more time in the flat when it was still as silent as a tomb was maddening. John had never wanted to move about more in his life, it seemed, and yet he was stuck indoors, quieter than a church mouse.

He itched to be doing something, anything. He'd used the afternoon of the day before and that morning to put most of the flat back to rights, but that avenue of industry was all but exhausted. There wasn't any activity left that his Sherlock's proverbial storm cloud hadn't rained on. Even blogging had become impossible. He was at the same dead end as his friend. Setting his cup down on the much-besmirched counter, John remembered his flatmate just in time to imagine that he'd felt the concentration of demons lurking over the couch intensify. Biting his lip, John told himself firmly that he was being fanciful. He glanced around for inspiration, but was met with an unhelpful reticence on every surface. The flat remained pitiless for his plight; he was on his own for the remainder of whatever havoc lay in store. It was just him, Sherlock, and the silent uproar of the man's unstoppable mind.

As they wandered, the doctor's eyes at last alighted on a welcome sight. He tried not to stare at Sherlock's phone, cast carelessly onto a teetering pile of books on a side table. If Lestrade didn't get in contact with them soon, one or both of 221B's inhabitants would go mad. He pushed away from the counter. Wading into the living room's oppressive atmosphere, he went to the front window, the one farthest from his flatmate. His eyes traced the passersby and cars on Baker Street, flicking hurriedly from one urban sight to another. He was truthful enough with himself to confess inwardly that he was searching the traffic for a police lorry, despite his efforts to ignore the invisible monster crouching menacingly behind him.

On the street below, a delivery van trundled up to the curb in front of the shop run by Mrs. Hudson. Blinking, John raised an eyebrow as the driver cut the engine and climbed down from the cab. There was a separate delivery entrance for the shop's supplies. Obviously, the driver hadn't been informed of it, John thought. Then the little, purple-clad figure of his landlady hurried out to meet the man in the delivery company's brown uniform, tugging on her matching winter jacket to ward off the cold. The doctor couldn't hear what she was saying, but from her hand motions, she was obviously directing the man to the correct place for him to make his delivery. She tried several times to explain, probably in her most motherly of tones each time. The man nodded slightly, almost as if he were trying not to fall asleep. Mrs. Hudson acted like he had acknowledged what she was saying and gestured that he commence correcting his error. He inclined his head just a little once more.

Then nothing.

John felt a small frown tug at his lips as the deliveryman, a scruffy, shabby sort of character, stared blankly back at Mrs. Hudson's increasingly insistent gestures. His brown furrowing, he looked at the man more intently, seeing anew his unwashed, ill-fitting uniform, bloodshot eyes, and reddened nose. Mrs. Hudson's body language was growing slightly nervous. As she tried again to make her wishes known, John saw the man bling glassily and sway slightly where he stood. The doctor in him catalogued the signs critically even as his feet took a preemptory step towards the door. His mind took a moment to catch up with his body; then it clicked.

"He's drunk," John muttered, an undercurrent of anger in his voice. "Pissed out of his bloody mind." Turning on his heel, he strode out of the flat and down the stairs. He was not about to let his dear, elderly landlady associate with a lumbering drunk alone.

He didn't see Sherlock's head raise slightly off of the pillow as he left the room.


	3. Chapter 2

**A/N: Hello. This is Knyle Borealis, the author. I'm finally figuring out how to make friends with this site, so please bear with me if any of the formatting/structural stuff doesn't make sense. I'll keep editing.**

This is my First Fanfiction Ever. I love Sherlock and John with a passion that started back when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was the only authority on the subject (not meaning to exclude Jeremy Brett, Basil Rathbone, or any of those other wonderful people who brought my hero to life), and ever since my seven-year-old self picked up a volume of "A Study in Scarlet," I have been in love with the world of Sherlock Holmes.

It's not Brit-picked AT ALL, so I apologize. I welcome any feedback that you feel like giving, nice or no, so please comment!

**Disclaimer—****_none of this is mine! _Okay, well, a wee bit of it may be mine… (Blood, Sweat, and Tears included) but all of the good stuff definitely belongs to Doyle, Moffat, and Gatiss. I thank them greatly.**

I hope you enjoy it.

**Note: I did a bit of swimming here as I sounded out how I wanted John to react to his/Mrs. Hudson's visitor. I'm sorry if it got a bit long. Once again, I'll be back for editing later.**

* * *

When he burst out the front door, tugging his arms into the jacket he'd snagged off the wall on his way past the hooks, John was surprised to see that someone else had come to Mrs. Hudson's aid before him. In the time that it had taken him to descend the stairs, one of the people walking by on the sidewalk had halted at the older woman's side. It was a young girl, with a lissome wisp of a figure and a profile that bespoke an older teenager. She stood next to John's landlady, her blond hair waving slightly past her shoulders, with her hands thrust deeply in the light blue rain coat that she wore. It looked woefully inadequate against the early spring chill and was highly incongruous with her battered, well-worn work boots. John couldn't help but notice them; they were perhaps a few sizes too large and their tops were overshadowed by what looked to be the tops of three pairs of woolen socks in muted blues and browns.

They looked army-issue, those boots. He'd worn a pair much like it in Afghanistan. Although, something about her footwear was definitely different than what he was used to…but that wasn't his main concern just then. Turning his attention back to the problem at hand, John let the matter of the stranger's clothing drop from his mind. With a quick tug on the leather-and-patches coat that was insulating his shoulders from the season's chill, he walked over to stand on Mrs. Hudson's nearest side, hearing the last of what the oddly clad stranger was saying.

"—my saying so, I think it might be best if he didn't drive anywhere," she was gently telling Mrs. Hudson. She had a soft, clear voice.

Coming up beside his landlady, John inquired, "Everything all right here?"

All eyes turned his way, including a glazed, reddened pair that was also, upon closer inspection, remarkably dilated. The doctor in John added drugs to his list of reasons behind the serviceperson's inebriation, and the fingers of his left hand—the tremor that had plagued him since leaving Afghanistan had conveniently disappeared—slipped into his pocket after his mobile phone. If he could, he meant to have the man escorted by a constable when he left their presence. He wouldn't call yet, though. He wanted to make sure that the giant fellow wouldn't react badly to such a phone call first. As his left hand showed, John wasn't worried in the least about going at it with an enormous, angry drunk and surviving. There was no way, however, that he was going to risk the health of Mrs. Hudson or the solicitous stranger at her side by getting into a row with a possibly violent behemoth hopped up on who-knows-what kind of chemicals.

"Oh!" Mrs. Hudson turned to him in grateful surprise. "Yes, we're just getting things sorted, John, dear," she tittered, obviously flustered and even more obviously pleading for him to do something about the situation with her kindly brown eyes.

"I was just suggesting that it might be best if we took care of unloading ourselves," the young woman spoke up quietly. Up close, John saw that he'd been wrong to think her a child. Something about the look in her eyes made him sure that she was older than she first appeared, perhaps in her early twenties "I'm not certain that this gentleman is up to it."

It took him a moment to answer. The blonde, blue-eyed female gazed patiently up at him, the perfect picture of calm. John knew that he had never seen her before in his life, but he couldn't shake the feeling of familiarity that he felt looking her. It was strange. She kept catching him off guard. Shrugging the odd observation off, the doctor found himself nodding. A glance at the bedraggled deliveryman sealed his opinion on the matter of the truck. The man could barely stand up on his own, let alone drive around to the back of the shop or carry in whatever shipment he was supposed to be bringing. John spared a quick glance to the man's slovenly uniform. His battered name tag read "Max."

"Right. Max, how about you go visit the bar while we take care of things here?" he recommended to the unwelcome fourth party there on the sidewalk.

Dazedly, the man thought it over. Long moments passed as John, Mrs. Hudson, and the young woman stood by. John was just starting to wonder if he'd been understood when the deliveryman gave a start and nodded jerkily. Unsteadily, he turned in the direction that the doctor had indicated. Taking small, shambling steps, the man meandered down the sidewalk towards his next spot of refreshment. Unbeknownst to him, there was a corner between 221B and his goal that was the favorite spot for the local bobby to pause on his beat and watch the passersby. Judging by the time on John's watch, that same officer would be frequenting the corner at that very moment, and he was more than sharp enough to spot a staggering drunk in a crowd. Still, one couldn't be too careful.

Digging his mobile out of his pocket, he handed it to Mrs. Hudson and directed her, "Why don't you call him in? There's a number that will work for the police dispatch under Lestrade's name in the directory. See if you can't get them to pick him up. I sent him towards the Criterion."

His landlady nodded in acquiescence, bending her head over the mobile device. "Honestly, people these days," she protested quietly to the phone. "I was worried that he was going to fall out of the van. A man that size, I was sure that I was going to be crushed."

"Well, it's a good thing you didn't have to catch him, then," John observed absentmindedly, glancing around the suddenly empty sidewalk.

The young woman in the blue raincoat was not in evidence. John assumed that she had continued on to whatever business she'd been attending to before embarking on her charitable display of support for Mrs. Hudson. The metallic rattle of the van's rear door sliding open brought him out of his thoughts. Walking to the back of the delivery vehicle, he found that the kind stranger had not left after all. She was clambering up into the truck bed, reaching for the first box of baking flour in the stack awaiting delivery. Hefting it into her arms, she turned, found John waiting with arms outstretched, and handed over her burden, grabbing another before hopping lightly down onto the pavement. Mrs. Hudson finished her call and looked up to find the two of them waiting patiently at the door of her shop, unable to free their hands to grasp the handles. Smiling and tucking John's phone into a hidden pocket of her dress, she skittered over to oblige their unspoken request.

Holding the door open with her foot so she could talk with her hands, she directed them towards the back. "Just through that door there, dears. I've had a space cleared out on the shelves for the new shipment since yesterday."

John and the young woman strode to the back room, finding it just as Mrs. Hudson had said. The small, medium-sized storage area was neat and well-stocked. A single window let in copious amounts of light down at the far end of it, leaving no need for the row of lights that ran along the ceiling. Mrs. Hudson flicked them on anyway, probably out of habit, and led the way into the room. The only other door besides the one they'd entered through was to the left, directly opposite the window. It led into the kitchen where Mrs. Hudson made her baked goods. Looking about, John saw that there was indeed an empty space for the flour in the long, deep shelves that lined the walls.

Before he could head towards it, however, Mrs. Hudson babbled something about leaving bread in the oven and scurried off through the door to the kitchen, leaving John alone with the helpful stranger and their boxes. They could both hear his landlady talking agitatedly to herself, alternating between complaining about the state of affairs in the service world and scolding herself for forgetting about her bread. Out of the corner of his eye, the doctor thought he saw the cheek of the woman beside him shape into the curve of a smile. At that, he felt a small moment of amused pride in his landlady. She really was a treasure, Mrs. Hudson.

Beside him, the woman murmured, "She seems very sweet."

"She's that, certainly." Smiling fondly over the elderly woman's silliness himself, John went to the long table that ran parallel to the shelves and cut down the middle of the long room.

"This is her shop?"

John nodded. "Yes. She owns the building."

"I bet she's excellent in a kitchen," she remarked, looking down at the flour she was holding and then around at the shelves full of cooking and baking supplies.

John set his box down close to the spot where the flour would go. Glancing back, he commented warmly, "She's not bad as a landlady, either."

The blue-eyed woman followed after him to the table, standing so close that their elbows bumped when John turned away from where he'd set his down his load. He'd placed it on the far side with a shove to make unpacking easier. She made to copy him, bending down with a slow deliberateness that he marked for its care. He heard a small hiss of air escape through her teeth as her spine curved, which she quickly bit back. Then she lost her grip on her burden entirely. Ears perking at the first sign of a body in pain, John saw her fumble and went on alert immediately.

"Are you all right?" he inquired concernedly.

The burden the woman had been carrying landed with a heavy thud against the sunlit wood, and she stepped back from it quickly, putting distance between herself and the curious doctor. Alarmed by the stricken look on her face, John took an instinctive step towards her, lest she faint and he need to catch her. Obviously, she was not at all fine or right. She looked ready to drop at any time. To John's surprise, however, the next moment she was nodding jerkily in response to his question and taking an answering step backwards with just as much alacrity as her previous one.

Her haste only made him more intent on finding out what the trouble was. Aside from it, there was nothing in her demeanor to belie her unspoken confirmation of her good health. Actions weren't the only indications of wellbeing, though. Without even thinking about it, John studied her face, noting how pale she had become, watching a bead of sweat slide down out of sight in the bright threads of her waving blonde hair. Her eyes were tightened at the corners, her lips pursed, and he could see her jaw tighten even as he watched: all classic signs of intense pain.

Then, in an instant, she changed. Abruptly, the agitation passed from her features, and before John's very eyes, all the pain disappeared. Impossibly, it seemed, in the space of time that it took for one indrawn breath, she became completely composed. The doctor felt a shock go through him at the difference taking effect in her. It was utterly unbelievable. Her face smoothed out, her posture relaxed, and she met his eyes evenly. If not for her poor color, John would have wondered if he'd just imagined the agony he'd seen on her face. Then the second of transformation ended, and she was nodding her head at him once again, much more evenly than she had previously.

In her gentle, mellifluous voice, she assured him, "Yes, I'm fine, thank you." Taking another, more measured step back, she turned on her heel and walked quickly around the table to the empty shelf, adjusting a larger space on it in preparation for the biggest sacks of flour. "I'll just start unpacking the boxes, if you'd like to continue unloading the van."

Undecided, John remained where he was, the doctor in him cataloguing her every movement. For all appearances, she seemed perfectly fine. There was nothing to show that she was in any way injured or ill. He watched a moment as she found a box cutter and opened the first parcel, beginning to unload the heavy sacks of flour without any sign of discomfort. Frowning, John opened his mouth to ask after her health one more time, but there was the sound of a door swinging shut and pattering footsteps out in the shop. Mrs. Hudson's voice drifted back through the open door from where she stood at the front of her store. John couldn't see his landlady, but he could imagine her standing anxiously at the window clearly enough, her arms crossed across her chest in an expression of her unease.

"John, dear, I don't mean to rush you, but I'm afraid I'm a mite nervous about leaving the truck open unattended," she called back to her listening lodger. More to herself than the sandy-haired man who had come to the doorway of her storage room, she murmured, "It's ridiculous, people driving around tipsy at midday. Makes one wonder about everyone else on the street…"

"Right, I'm coming." Casting one last glance of worry at the young woman in the raincoat, who was still studiously moving bags of flour from her box to the shelf, John walked out into the shop. Mrs. Hudson was exactly where he'd imagined she'd be, in just the pose that he'd pictured. Smiling a bit at her predictability, he came over and patted her reassuringly on the shoulder, saying as he pushed the door open, "I'll have your shipment inside before you know it." As he walked out, another niggling stab of disquiet about the girl imposed upon him, and he added over his shoulder, "Why don't you go and help the lady in the blue–er, help _her_ get things sorted?"

Mrs. Hudson nodded and walked back towards the storage room, and John felt a small tension release in his chest. The young woman—he realized belatedly that he had yet to ask her for her name—_seemed_ fine enough, but he hadn't become a decorated army doctor by ignoring his instincts. He thought again of her shortened breath, pained expression, and hunched posture. There was definitely something wrong there, he reflected as he hopped up into the back of the van and reached for the next box in the stack, hurrying to pile a second one onto his load before leaping athletically to the curb. He would just have to watch her carefully to see what it was.

A small voice in his head reminded him that she obviously wanted to keep the matter private, and that she had just done him and his beloved landlady a service—was _still_ doing so. He just couldn't squelch the caretaking urge that he'd nurtured since enrolling in medical school. If someone was hurt, he'd made it his life's work to heal them. What was he expected to do if he suspected that there was an injured person close by him? He sighed. He _knew_ what was expected. Like every other busy, self-involved Londoner who had passed her on the street that day, he was supposed to look the other way. Obviously that was what the young woman intended for him to do. Unfortunately for her privacy, however, Sherlock had pretty much eradicated all of John's impartiality towards those around him.

John frowned as he hooked the door, which Mrs. Hudson had propped slightly ajar, open with his foot. There was no helping it; he'd become as much of a meddler as his flatmate. Oh, that was just what he needed. As if he didn't have enough trouble making friends after Afghanistan thanks to Sherlock. Realizing that the tall brunette was invading his life in yet another fashion, John cringed. He would have to be careful about how he acted around the girl. He was itching to go in and start questioning her about what he'd seen, but he managed to stave off the instinct by recalling her good deeds and telling himself that he should wait until they were somewhat more acquainted. At least With Mrs. Hudson there in the room with her he knew that she was under some form of tending.

Aside from his more natural thoughts, his mind rattled off facts and theories to accompany what he had seen, assessing and diagnosing without John even having to consider doing so. The fact that she had been bending over above the waist when afflicted by the pain she expressed indicated an injury in the area of her chest. He could tell that she hadn't punctured a lung from her breathing, and it was impossible to tell if she had any internal bleeding, what with a poker face like she had and the fact that only her face and hands were visible to the skin. He'd never seen anyone in pain pull themselves together so quickly, not even in the army, where a reputation for toughness was as coveted as a day of leave in a brothel. He hadn't thought such composure was possible after a display of such acute torment… Perhaps that was because it _wasn't_.

Frowning more fiercely before, John shook his head and walked faster towards the storage room. A minute after he'd seen the blonde's tortured expression, he was already questioning the validity of his observations. Her turnaround was so complete. Had he just imagined seeing her falter? The sound of two female voices in quiet conversation reached his ears: Mrs. Hudson's familiar, motherly tones accompanied by softer, pleasant ones. The young woman could be speaking quietly on purpose, to avoid exerting her diaphragm or putting stress on her ribs, he supposed as he walked towards the room where the two women were working. Although he really couldn't imagine her ever raising her voice, for some reason.

The voices grew louder as he walked down the aisle to the back room. There was no sense in getting Mrs. Hudson or the young woman upset with a gloomy expression, he told himself as he reached the door. His frown was erased the moment that he was in their vision, and he pretended preoccupation with his double load to keep himself from examining the girl outright, nodding and responding vaguely to Mrs. Hudson's cheerful greeting. He was careful not to watch the other, blue-eyed female ostentatiously, walking the two boxes he was carrying over to her side of the table and setting them down close enough that he was able to look at her without turning his head. Once again, he took in her army boots, which were obviously very much used but well taken care of, her lightly-colored, thin raincoat, and the overall wear and tear on her personage before raising his eyes to his true point of interest: her perpetually serene face.

His doctor's brain took over, diagnosing just as it had before. Same pallid complexion. In addition, barely noticeable even to someone who was looking for it: eyes slightly tightened, brows knit, breathing shallow. Sweating along hairline. And there, also along her hairline: a faint discoloration. Remembering just in time not to tense up and stare, John grabbed the box cutter and set to opening the two containers that he had brought in as a ruse to keep studying the quiet stranger. As he set to that task, he noted several more dark marks along the side of her face, on her lower jaw, and down her neck between the knit fabric of her dark gray turtleneck and ear. He couldn't see any more than that, but it was more than enough to startle him.

_Bloody Hell._ As John reached his conclusion about what was wrong with her, a wave of anger went through him. He was more than half surprised when he was successful at suppressing it. There were few things that could enrage him, after all the things he'd lived through. The young woman was a prime example of one of them. More than ever, he wanted to ask questions, and it wasn't just the doctor in him that wanted to know what happened anymore, either. He knew that he needed a moment to think of the right things to say, however, and Mrs. Hudson was looking nervously in the direction of the truck again. It was time for him to get more boxes. And to think—hard—about how he was going to address what he'd just discovered.


	4. Chapter 3

**A/N: Hello. This is Knyle Borealis, the author. I'm finally figuring out how to make friends with this site, so please bear with me if any of the formatting/structural stuff doesn't make sense. I'll keep editing.**

This is my First Fanfiction Ever. I love Sherlock and John with a passion that started back when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was the only authority on the subject (not meaning to exclude Jeremy Brett, Basil Rathbone, or any of those other wonderful people who brought my hero to life), and ever since my seven-year-old self picked up a volume of "A Study in Scarlet," I have been in love with the world of Sherlock Holmes.

It's not Brit-picked AT ALL, so I apologize. I welcome any feedback that you feel like giving, nice or no, so please comment!

**Disclaimer—****_none of this is mine! _Okay, well, a wee bit of it may be mine… (Blood, Sweat, and Tears included) but all of the good stuff definitely belongs to Doyle, Moffat, and Gatiss. I thank them greatly.**

I hope you enjoy it.

**Note: John wears mittens. Yeah, maybe he seems like more of a gloves person, but Mrs. Hudson gave them to him for Christmas, they're warm, and he's always being dragged out into the sort of a weather that a man with a history of injuries like his shouldn't experience. My friend's knee gets really sore in the cold, and she says that it acts up in rain, too. Seeing as how she wasn't shot and it still bothers her, I imagine that John has a lot more to deal with and therefore will gladly take any sort of protection from the elements that he can get. SO HE WEARS BLOODY MITTENS. (I may or may not have been arguing with myself about this for the past hour...)**

* * *

Since the young woman was assiduously not looking at him as she talked with his landlady, John was reasonably certain that his inspection had gone unnoticed when he turned back towards the door of the storage room. He managed to hold the frown out of his expression long enough to exit, but it settled onto his lips readily enough as soon as he was out of the range their sight. He had been right all along. No, the young woman wasn't fine, as she had told him. She wasn't even close.

He'd seen brawlers in better shape than her. She had been beaten so harshly that the skin on the side of her head and neck was bruised black and blue, some of it splitting painfully. The swelling distorted the marks' shape, but John had been in enough conflict to recognize the outline of a man's knuckles from the imprint that they'd left on her rear jaw. He could still see a nearly perfect outline left by a ring on her attacker's right ring finger. No doubt that her other injuries had stemmed from the same violent source. She had at least one broken rib, if not worse, and a good deal of tissue damage. He was sure of that, considering the brutality that it had taken to render the pale flesh of her head and neck so marred.

A fierce urge to punch something overtook him, which he quelled just as ferociously. He wanted to slam the perpetrator's head into a wall, but that was hardly going to happen when he didn't even know who the guilty party was. He most certainly didn't have the right to ask her about it or get involved in the first place. _Bugger the whole mess._ With a scowl, John yanked two more boxes off of the stack and left the van again, his jaw clenched as he considered what to do about the quiet blond stranger. Odd though it seemed for an army man, he hated any signs of violence. Especially undue violence, especially on women, and even more especially on one that seemed so kindhearted. But he didn't like being lied to, either. Lying patients automatically hindered his ability to administer his aid and expertise.

He stopped himself there. The young woman hadn't come to him looking for medical expertise. She had stepped in to support his landlady, whom she had no ties nor allegiance to, and was even then helping the older woman set her storage room to rights despite her own well-disguised discomfiture. And all for no apparent reason other than that she had an inclination towards acts of goodwill. John was nothing more than an equally foreign stranger to her, and though she had been amicable enough thus far, she certainly couldn't be expected to welcome a sudden confrontation about her physical wellbeing from someone she had known for less than ten minutes.

Well, maybe if it was a casual inquiry, she wouldn't mind, but John didn't think that his demanding that she tell him who had blunted his fist on her head would qualify as polite conversation. Some amount of caution and tact was called for, if he really wanted to learn the whole story. Then he could go show the idiot who'd laid hands on the young woman what it was like to swing at an opponent who could—and would—swing back. But there he went again, getting ahead of himself. His tiring week was making him far too easily angered. Closing his eyes, John sighed and forced his rigid shoulders to relax. It wasn't his first time dealing with a victim of aggression. He knew full well that there was more to the situation than a quick call to Scotland Yard and a "chat" with her attacker could fix. He needed to know what had happened and why before he could decide what to do.

Which was _so_ likely for him to find out, considering that he still had yet to learn the lady's _name_.

Ignoring the sarcasm of his thoughts, John deposited his boxes on the table in the storage room once again. He was pleased to find that Mrs. Hudson had drawn the girl into a conversation about baking. The topic seemed to be distracting her from her act of nonchalance. While her face had cleared of its troubled concentration, her movements had become much more guarded and cautious. He could clearly see that she was favoring her right side, using her right arm gingerly and choosing to rotate her whole body rather than twist her torso to move sacks of flour from their box to the shelf. A broken rib then, if not two, and damage to the shoulder of her right arm. John cut open the boxes again, just to give himself more time to look at her, but could tell nothing more by time that he was due to leave.

He gathered up the last two boxes of the shipment and closed the truck's back door, sliding the locking mechanism into place before returning to the pavement. He had decided that his best chance at finding out what he should do about the woman and her injuries was speak with her about something else and see if she let anything useful slip out about what had happened. He'd noticed that people were much happier sharing about an injury that they wanted kept quiet when they made the initial admission themselves rather than having it pushed in their face. Perhaps it was a boon that Sherlock was tucked away upstairs. Had his flatmate been there, John was sure that the girl would have already been on the defensive and that all hope of getting her to talk would be lost.

Though an incredible actor and a skilled interrogator, sometimes John's tall, whip-thin friend had all the tenacity and brashness a charging rhinoceros. In all likelihood, Sherlock would have pounced on the blond stranger the minute that he laid eyes on her. When he was recovering from so long a period of boredom as the one he'd been in lately, the detective would undoubtedly lay all of the girl's secrets bare to the world without qualm in his eagerness to exercise his mind before he thought better of it—_if_ it actually occurred to him that he was being an ass. If John tried to talk to the young woman after that, he would have no hope of learning anything. She had no idea how lucky he was that Sherlock was in a snit. John's lips quirked into small, wry smile over her unwitting escape, but the grin faded even more quickly than it had come. He had work to do, and he hurried into the store room to get to it.

Almost instinctively, he found his shoulders straightening into parade posture, his steps becoming even more precise than his normal, even tread. His body was recalling the way that he had carried himself the last time he had been met with a victim of veiled physical abuse. He'd been deployed by then, and dealing with all the hazing and hostility of a well-worn unit. In all truth, John reflected, he had the army to thank for his more disturbing encounters with the vicious side of humanity. As a soldier, he had dealt with everything from brawls between comrades to tight-lipped, much-beaten army spouses and battered, bloodied, broken bodies on the battlefield. Hence his falling into military bearing. It was true that his time with Sherlock had led him to expect the strange and bizarre in every instance, but it was the army that had conditioned him to deal with savagery and its aftereffects.

His thoughts on his previous life's calling, John strode up to the threshold of the storage room with a slightly distracted air. The sight that met his eyes, however, had all such thoughts flying from his head. It made him halt abruptly in the doorway, blinking in surprise. "_What_?"

Mrs. Hudson half turned, seeing him standing behind her and smiling sunnily at his thunderstruck expression. "Oh, John, you're here. Tell me what you think of this, won't you?"

John blinked again, baffled past the point of responding. Except for its occupants, the room was just as he'd left it. The boxes of flour waited patiently on the table, half emptied and unattended. The box cutter was balancing precariously on the edge of the shelf, where Mrs. Hudson had indubitably placed it without thinking, and in his peripheral vision John could see it wobble every time the shelves shook. He didn't bother looking over at it, though. The source of the shaking was much more arresting.

Like a veritable monkey, the young woman was six feet off of the ground in the far corner of the room, teetering with her feet on the shelving and one hand braced against the window frame while she reached out with the other. She and Mrs. Hudson were working together to reposition a framed, painted landscape of the northern moors that John's landlady kept above the window. John could hardly believe his eyes. Wasn't the girl supposed to be seriously injured? And yet there she was playing acrobat, barely balancing on shelves that could never take the weight of a full-grown adult. Greatly mistrusting the structural integrity of the blue-eyed female's perch, John moved into the room. As he approached, she managed to get her fingers on the image and shifted it, looking inquiringly down at her purple watcher for approval.

Mrs. Hudson nodded. "Yes, that's better. Could you just get it a little more to the left, dearie? It's still a bit crooked."

The helpful stranger nodded and moved to do as asked, but as she stretched out to comply with Mrs. Hudson's request, John's fears came to fruition. The shelf that her left foot was resting on flipped forward just enough to dislodge her without toppling its contents. With a small sound of surprise, the girl dropped, plummeting toward the cement floor. John cursed violently in his head, lurching into motion without a thought. In front of him, Mrs. Hudson shrieked in dismay, leaping back, but John managed to get around her without a collision as he darted forward. It occurred to him that he was going to have to dive for it, but luck was on his side. With arms outstretched, he reached the window just in time to remain on his feet and still achieve his munificent goal.

He caught the young woman before he'd even realized that he was trying to. Much to both of their surprise, the blonde landed neatly in his arms, going unscathed rather than colliding with the harsh cement underfoot. She bounced slightly in John's grasp, gasping as her injuries came into contact with his hold, and he adjusted hastily to her slight weight. It was much easier to stay upright much than he had expected it to be. The woman was only a few inches shorter than he was, yet her small form barely claimed two thirds of his weight. Almost as a reflex, the sandy-haired man frowned at the discrepancy between her height and heft. She was alarmingly underweight for her size, he observed dourly. Though, holding her allowed him to feel that her willowy figure was better-rounded than her shapeless outerwear had led him to believe.

While he thought that through, an aroma of lavender and heather wafted up to his nose, easing the grim expression off of his face. John realized that he was cradling the young woman against his chest like a child; he could feel the cold radiating off her still-frozen coat and into his arms and chest through his sweater. Working to catch his breath, the doctor looked down to find a grateful, pinched gaze looking back at him, peeking out from behind the would-be wall-crawler's bent elbows. Her eyes were only a shade bluer than the color of the country skies that he had watched through window of his father's practice when he was a child. It was an odd thing for him to notice, John thought to himself offhandedly. Then he brushed the distraction aside.

For the second time that day, he pressed her, "Are you all right?"

Mrs. Hudson appeared at his elbow even as she was speaking, crying, "Goodness, dear, I thought you'd fall to your death! Are you all right?" Then, laying a hand on her lodger's arm, she exclaimed in relief, "Thank heavens you caught her, John!"

Blinking once or twice, the young woman slowly lowered her arms, nodding. Her throat worked once or twice before she was able to say anything, almost like she was swallowing down a cry. Then, very, very quietly, she murmured to the both of them, "Yes, I am, thank you."

Her voice was the epitome of serenity, but John didn't miss the way that her arms settled over her ribs, curling around them protectively. He raised an eyebrow, impressed by her control of both her voice and her body. She'd had the presence of mind to twist around in midair so that she would land on her back instead of her front, and had tucked her hands tightly behind her head to cushion it lest it crack against the concrete. Evidently, however, she hadn't had enough concentration left over to keep up her charade of wellbeing as well as save herself. Her eyes were nearly shut with pain, and tears glistened at their corners in betrayal of her earlier pretense. Immediately jolted into doctor mode at the sight of her distress, John turned and set her down gently on the table, sitting her down on the edge of it when he felt her start to resist against laying down.

There was a faint stirring behind him, the smallest shifting of air currents, and he was aware of a fourth presence in the small room. Or rather, lurking in the shadow of the doorway just outside it. Sherlock had heard Mrs. Hudson's cry and come to investigate. Fighting the urge to turn around and tell his flatmate to see to their landlady before she succumbed to heart palpitations, John let Sherlock have his phantom-of-the-shadows moment.

Mrs. Hudson was a sturdy, capable woman, as she'd proven many a time when her "boys" had brought their adventures home with them. In all likelihood, she would see that she got herself her own cup of tea and a rest without any prodding, without requiring Sherlock to enter and commence badgering John's patient. The young woman, he meant. Whose name he really should find out before he started diagnosing her with critical injuries. And, more importantly, who he should start attending to, with or without a name.

"Are your—"John started to ask the young woman a more specific question about the pain she was in, but he was interrupted again by Mrs. Hudson, who was still fussing over the disaster that had nearly befallen her Good Samaritan.

"Oh, I'm so glad that you weren't hurt," she informed her helper earnestly, hurriedly clearing a space in the boxes so that the younger woman could scoot back farther onto the table. "I thought I'd faint right away when I saw you lose your grip." The injured blond moved into the space that had been emptied for her, giving the worrying mother hen in purple an appreciative look that was more for Mrs. Hudson's benefit than anything. Hovering nervously by, the elderly woman wondered aloud, "Maybe a spot of tea would do us all some good. Would you like some, you two?"

John waited until the blonde responded to answer the inquiry himself. With a nod, she gave Mrs. Hudson a small smile. "You're too kind."

Mrs. Hudson blushed and waved off her praise, turning to the doctor. "John?"

"Ah."

It took John a moment for him to remember how to speak. Seeing the smile on the young woman's face had surprised him. She was a sweet little thing, to be sure, but her kind eyes and sensitive expression put her only barely beyond the barrier of pretty. Add an upward turn to her lips, however, and it was an entirely different story. Catching himself reeling, John shook his head free of the small shock to his system and refocused on the expectant gaze watching him. Glancing over at Mrs. Hudson, he nodded and muttered an agreement, giving her a reassuring smile that he hoped would manage to get her out the door.

"What? Oh, yes, tea would be great, thanks."

Satisfied, she bustled out, headed for her kitchen. That left only Sherlock to be rid of before John could give the blue eyes watching him the true privacy that they were owed. Unobtrusively, he slipped his hand behind his back, using a waving gesture to suggest to Sherlock that it was time for him to leave. He could only hope that his flatmate's curiosity about the goings-on of the day was weak enough to be overridden by his meager respect for John's wishes.

If he didn't leave, John knew that he might as well just invite him in and let the detective's eager deductive wrath tear the girl to pieces. Honestly, though, he would rather let the sweet-tempered stranger go on her way and hope that she made it to a hospital than subject her to that. For all that Sherlock was a great and formidable man, John was not about to trust him to handle matters of delicacy—or "sentiment," as Sherlock liked to call it—when there was not a case at risk. It just wasn't the sociopath's area.

While he waited to be sure that he and the woman were truly alone, John moved so that he was leaning against the table beside her, crossing his arms to get rid of the anxiety that he saw his proximity inspired in her. She seemed very leery of letting him get close. Having his hands tucked securely against his ribs seemed to put her at ease, at least. Since she didn't know him from Adam, he assumed that her wariness was because she didn't trust men in general rather than take it personally. If a man had given her the wounds that he'd seen evidence of, John reflected, he certainly couldn't blame her for being suspicious. It wouldn't help him any if she remained leery of him, however. Doing his best to make his expression neutral and unthreatening, he met the young blonde's blue gaze and introduced himself.

"I'm John Watson," he told her in the same frank, even tone that he used with all his patients at the clinic. "In case you were wondering."

Blinking, she clasped her hands tightly in her lap and looked down, still fighting to cover up her shakiness. Her voice was as even and sweet as ever when she nodded, affirming, "I was, actually." Taking a deep breath, she looked up and favored him with a tentative smile, greeting him shyly, "It's nice to meet you, John. I'm…please call me Ness."

She almost sounded like she was pleading with him to call her by the peculiar name. His eyebrows quirking together in puzzlement, John nodded in acquiescence. He gave her a smile of his own in an attempt to seem encouraging as he replied, "Ness it is, then."

At that, her smile grew, making her even comelier than it had before. Then she looked down again, inquiring demurely, "Have you been in the service for a long time, John?"

Straightening, John uncrossed his arms and frowned, wondering, "How did you—?"

"I had a friend in the military, once," she explained, looking almost apologetic for startling him. "And I've known a few other soldiers. It's the way you carry yourself."

Recalling the last time that someone had interpreted his posture as that of a soldier on a first meeting, John shook his head bewilderedly. "Of course it is." Then he remembered that she had asked him a question, so he made an effort to push his wonder away and supplied, "I haven't been a soldier for a while now, actually."

She raised her eyebrows in interest. "Really? What do you do, then?"

What did he do? A myriad of possible answers ran through John's head. He babysat his best friend. He'd shot a murderer. He watched and helped his flatmate solve crimes. He got shot at and had people trying to kill him a lot, too. He wrote stories about their adventures in a blog. When he was bored, he found himself waiting around for a serial killer to pop up. He could spend hours a day disinfecting the kitchen. …And then, at the tail end of the parade, came his answer:

"I'm a doctor."

"Oh." Ness blinked once. "That's nice."

Her voice held nothing but politeness, but John saw wariness flicker in her eyes before she hid it, and her elbows inched closer to her body, as if she wanted to use her arms to hide her ribs from him. That was just about all that she gave away. With the self-control that he was coming to expect from her, she ensured that her hands stayed still and relaxed in her lap. Her gaze didn't even twitch towards the door, though she did break eye contact and incline her head slightly, making her hair fall forward and hide her bruises more thoroughly.

John felt a touch of anxiety about the movement. "Be careful," he cautioned her, sorry that he had to confront her with the fact that he'd seen through her act. Nevertheless, he still intended to make sure that she was taken care of before he let her leave. "You don't have to pretend," he told her gently. "I know that you're in pain, and there's no sense hiding what I can already see."

She didn't argue. John had expected a denial, at least, but for once he'd found a patient who was straightforward enough to admit defeat gracefully. With a sigh, Ness straightened up, holding herself carefully so as not to jar the right side of her body or her neck. Still unable to meet his eyes, she mused abashedly, "I had a feeling that you'd be able to tell."

John didn't know what to make of that. Seeing the look of chagrin on her face, he stated, "I'm only worried about you. You've been very kind, and no doctor likes seeing people hurt. Is there anything that I can do to help you?"

Swallowing, she told him with all sincerity, "I appreciate your concern, but I'm fine, really." When John's expression remained skeptical, her lips twitched upwards in a faint smile, and she asked unguardedly, "What can I do to convince you?"

He didn't bother tiptoeing around the problem. "What happened?"

"I'd rather not say," she answered quietly, looking down at her hands. "It's private."

And there was an obstacle that he could never circumnavigate, John told himself grimly. Privacy: unless Sherlock was in the room, it would always and forever keep polite people from having meaningful conversations. "It's private" was a universal block to gaining practical information. Granted, he was tired and grouchy and in no mood to compromise; on a normal day, John knew that he wouldn't have any problem with privacy. He was actually rather fond of it, just like any other person besides his flatmate. Ness obviously cherished the notion. At present, that was all but intolerable to him.

He could force the issue, but John sensed that he could learn more by letting her have her way. Leaning back against the table, he pressed intently, "How seriously are you hurt? Have you been to see a doctor?"

"It's nothing I can't handle," she said with assurance. Oddly enough, her lips quirked up in a quick smile as she answered his second question. "And I've gone to the best doctor I know." Then, before John could fire another probe at her, she met his eyes squarely with her intense blue gaze and stated, "I suppose it's silly of me to think that you would agree not to tell anyone about this."

John frowned at the indigo stare. "I still don't know what 'this' is," he reminded her.

She smiled sweetly at him, surprising him with a flicker of mischief in her gaze. "True enough."

He nearly smiled back unthinkingly, but his seriousness was just great enough to overpower the out-of-character reaction. Instead, John's brow furrowed. It was beyond his understanding, the way she kept pushing him off his center. There was just something about her that didn't feel the same as other people—other women, specifically. It wasn't attraction. The ex-army doctor was familiar enough with that sensation. No, whatever sort of effect she had proved to have on him, it wasn't nearly as pedestrian as the product of being good-looking. After all, he'd already noted that, though sweet-featured and comely when she smiled, Ness was far from the smoky stares and pouting lips of conventional beauty. And she was equally distant from the transparent motives and mindsets of unoriginal humanity.

Confused to the utmost about his inability to read her, John shook his head and noted dryly, "I've had an easier time pulling bullets out of bodies than I'm having getting answers out of you."

"Well, I've heard it said that challenges can be very enriching," she pointed out mildly, the mischief only able to be heard as the faintest of undertones in her lovely voice.

That part of her, her voice, was anything but plain, John observed with an unexpected note of interest. And her scent was hardly disagreeable, now that he really thought about it. Quite the opposite, actually... He shoved the mental remarks aside with some force before they could go any further. There was a beaten woman in the room with him, for Christ's sake. Despairing of his manners, John fell back into in his fruitless effort of information seeking with ease. The ability was a benefit a lifelong-habit of lost causes; John liked to think that it was still applicable to matters where he could actually be of use. Perhaps there was still hope for him to get through to her. After all, she hadn't fallen back on the true insurmountable argument: his complete lack of entitlement to her business.

"Ness," he started, keeping his tone even and open to encourage the same on her part, "Is there anything that someone else should know? I may not be in the army any longer, but I know the signs of a fight when I see them. If there's something that you need to share, you don't have to tell me, but there are plenty of people to talk to. The police, for instance."

After what he suspected she'd been through, most people would have shown some sign of trauma, grief, fear—anything—at such a direct address. Ness did no such thing. After one single, very deliberate blink, she told him tranquilly, "That's all been taken care of. Please, don't worry yourself."

Three quick, staccato beeps sounded, making them both jump. Ness winced at the sudden nervous movement, but even as her eyes squinted in pain, she was fishing a small, black object out of her raincoat's pocket. It was a mobile phone: durable, ugly, and several years out of date. Obviously the source of the startling noise. Flipping the mobile open as John watched, Ness ran her eyes over the text on its small screen. Then, for the first time since she'd arrived at 221 Baker Street, her veil of composure slipped aside all on its own. Her eyes widened slightly, her posture stiffened, and her lips parted in a long, faint intake of breath. John knew the expression on her face. Some nights, the emotion that spurred it into existence seemed more real and familiar to him than his own reflection.

Fear.

Whatever she'd read in her text, it had frightened her enough to rattle even her iron-clad serenity. Just as John was about to prompt her to explain, Mrs. Hudson came in with a tray piled high with her homemade biscuits and three cups of tea, announcing cheerfully, "Tea, dears."

The elderly woman set the tray down on the table, but Ness was already standing beside her when Mrs. Hudson turned to offer her a cup. With her hand in her pocket, she addressed the other woman regretfully, "I'm sorry, but I have to leave now. Something's come up."

Mrs. Hudson made exclamations of disappointment, but John wasn't listening. He was watching Ness's hand, shoved so forcefully into her raincoat that he could see the outline of her knuckles through the fabric. She was still clasping her unclosed phone in a death grip. Ness took a step towards the door, and he came back into the conversation just in time to hear Mrs. Hudson worry, "Are you sure you can't stay for tea?"

Ness smiled down at the little robin of a lady with genuine warmth. "I'm sure. Thank you, but I really must be going." Then her eyes slid away, up over the window behind John's head, and she added quietly, "I'm due home."

She turned and walked out the doorway. To John's surprise, he found himself following a few steps behind. He wasn't sure why, but his legs had carried him after her. Soon they were at the front door of the shop, which he opened for her, and she was turning to acknowledge Mrs. Hudson's call of thanks. As she twisted her neck to reply, her hair parted, and her turtleneck rode down. The sight of the bruises along the back of her neck and the side of her face was startling.

With a clearer view of her injuries, he finally realized what they took the shape of. Not only were there imprints of the knuckles of a fist along her jaw, but her neck bore the marks of fingers as well. Just to the right side of her throat, the long, thick stripes of darkness stretched eagerly from the rear towards the softer flesh of her esophagus, matched on the other side by a shorter, squatter brand made by a thumb. Someone, someone with remarkably large and strong hands, had been holding her by the back of her neck.

Though he was not an overly wishful sort of man, John hoped fervently that she had told him the truth about going to the police. Even without knowing what had happened or how much she was at fault for it, seeing those shadows on her pale skin was inherently wrong to him. On impulse, he stepped outside with Ness when she passed through the threshold, closing the door behind them so Mrs. Hudson wouldn't overhear. Finally, he could be thankful for the weather, since it had kept the sidewalk all but empty with its uninviting chill. Ness turned to him expectantly, waiting to hear what had brought him outdoors with her. John quite wanted to know, himself. He watched their breath cloud and mist in the biting air a moment before he became aware of the pair of thick mittens that he had left in his pockets from the day before.

Fishing them out hastily, he offered them to her, using her bare hands as an excuse to gather his thoughts. "Here," he muttered. "It's too cold out to be out of doors without a pair of these."

Having thought of her poorly suited clothing, he wished that he'd forgotten a hat and scarf in his pockets as well. With a nod of thanks, Ness accepted his gift and slipped her slender fingers into the wool, which his body heat had pre-warmed for her. Incidentally, its dark blue color matched her second pair of socks, and she glanced down at them with an amused glint in her eye before turning looking back at him. Gratitude had warmed the dark indigo of her eyes into a royal blue, and she murmured to him appreciatively, "I'll take good care of them."

He had no doubt that she would. Watching her woolen-clad hands drop down to her sides, he pressed her one last time, "You're sure that you're all right?"

"Yes." He felt the smile in her voice somewhere in his shoulder bones. As the warm hum was trickling down his spine and into the rest of him, Ness zipped her rain coat up all the way and took a step back, towards the nearest underground station. "Please tell Mrs. Hudson thank you for the tea and that I'm sorry that it had to go to waste," she requested, straightening her collar so that it would shelter her neck from the occasional, spiteful wind gust. Glancing back towards the shop windows, she suggested, "Perhaps the gentleman waiting outside the storage room would like some."

Sherlock, Sherlock, Sherlock. Why John had ever thought that the impossible man would consent to leave him and the poor girl in privacy was beyond him. Closing his eyes and shaking his head in exasperation, he muttered under his breath, "Incorrigible git."

Her soft laugh was like Christmas bells, and he looked up to find her eyes smiling right along with her curving lips. Without waiting for him to say anything more, she shook her head wonderingly and turned to walk away, saying as she did, "Take care, John."

"You, too."

He watched her walk to the corner where he'd sent drunken Max, merging with the heavier traffic flow as she turned out of sight. Her blue raincoat was the last thing he saw, flipping up in the wind as spring sought to ingratiate itself with winter's leftover frostiness. Then she was gone, and he was left standing on the sidewalk with the bemusing conviction that something had left with her. It wasn't his; he wasn't so disgustingly romantic that he could imagine a piece of him leaving with anyone, especially not someone that he hardly knew. Musing, John turned and walked back into the store, letting the door swish shut behind him. It was more like something of hers had disappeared. A sort of buoyancy, or warmth. That was the closest he could come to defining it. He'd felt heavier and colder with every step she'd taken away from 221 Baker Street.


	5. Chapter 4

**A/N: Hello. This is Knyle Borealis, the author. I'm finally figuring out how to make friends with this site, so please bear with me if any of the formatting/structural stuff doesn't make sense. I'll keep editing.**

This is my First Fanfiction Ever. I love Sherlock and John with a passion that started back when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was the only authority on the subject (not meaning to exclude Jeremy Brett, Basil Rathbone, or any of those other wonderful people who brought my hero to life), and ever since my seven-year-old self picked up a volume of "A Study in Scarlet," I have been in love with the world of Sherlock Holmes.

It's not Brit-picked AT ALL, so I apologize. I welcome any feedback that you feel like giving, nice or no, so please comment!

**Disclaimer—****_none of this is mine! _Okay, well, a wee bit of it may be mine… (Blood, Sweat, and Tears included) but all of the good stuff definitely belongs to Doyle, Moffat, and Gatiss. I thank them greatly.**

I hope you enjoy it.

**Note: Sherlock is not a mean person. He doesn't have much regard for niceties, he was never taught how to interact with other people, and yeah, he's really got no filter at all, but he's not malicious. If he's cruel, it's only because no one ever stopped _telling_ him not to be long enough to _show_ him how to stop (hence John's long, arduous task of humanizing him now). He may act like a prick most of the time, but his intentions are good. More or less.**

**Note 2: I love Sarah. She's a strong female character, and kudos to her for surviving a night with Sherlock Holmes and John Watson. She just forgot to tell John about some things...**

* * *

It took him half an hour to finish unpacking the flour and straighten up Mrs. Hudson's storage room. Sherlock, of course, was nowhere to be found when he'd gone back inside to work, though one of the teacups was used and a generous amount of biscuits were missing. John managed not to let his flatmate's avoidance get to him. With his hands, there was no way that Sherlock could have been of much help anyway, the doctor reflected as he took the flattened delivery boxes out to the bins. He was curious as to how the man had even managed to secure his meal without his bound fingers spilling and dropping everything.

Walking back indoors, the sandy-haired man thought of all the injuries that seemed to gather around him and wondered absently if his medical degree was a magnet for them. Reminded that he hadn't checked Sherlock's dressing that day, John gave Mrs. Hudson a nod and headed for the stairs. She waved to him, on her way out the door for her regular tea at a local cafe with friends, and favored him with a sunny smile of gratitude before she closed the door behind her.

It occurred to him that Sherlock might possibly have something less than damaging and more than enlightening to say about Ness. Perhaps the detective had noticed something about the blonde that would put his worries about her health at ease. Bounding up the incline with a reckless energy that usually could only found in his flatmate, John entered the flat in cautious-yet-hopeful silence. Strangely enough, he was met with a quiet even more profound than his own.

"Sherlock?" he called, looking about.

The living room was empty.

"Now where's he gotten to?" he muttered to himself, feeling a small flutter of trepidation as he considered some of the possible answers to his question.

Even more carefully than he had been doing before, John surveyed the area for evidence of chemical tampering or booby-trap experimenting, walking over to the kitchen entrance. Taking a quick breath of what may well have been his last dose of fresh air, he poked his head around the corner of the door, at the ready to throw himself out of the way of whatever came flying at his face first.

He didn't have to duck. Amazingly enough, no noxious fumes met his nose, no acrid chemical tangs ate at his eyeballs. He couldn't even detect the sound of a faucet left on or the stove still burning. Arching an eyebrow in surprise, John straightened and walked all the way into the empty kitchen, looking perplexedly around himself at the unusually tidy space. Seeing it without blemish was almost eerie. It seemed that Sherlock, having no hands with which to dirty it, had been forced to let the doctor's cleaning work alone.

The only signs that the brooding brunette had been in the room at all were the footsteps left in the faint dusting of debris on the floor. Though John must have swept the space seven times, more and more wood chips and other bits of the kitchen kept dislodging from its much-abused surfaces and covering the tile, creating a perfect record of all the comings and goings inside the room. Only his shoes and Sherlock's bare feet had made an appearance in the flat's cooking-turned-laboratory space that day. Truly baffled, John left the kitchen and walked slowly through the flat, his search bringing him to Sherlock's bedroom door. It was closed, but as he approached, a muffled thump and a crash sounded through the barrier. More thumping ensued, followed by another crash and then a low, unintelligible muttering in baritone.

Closing the distance between himself and the portal in two long strides, John knocked and called through the wood, "Sherlock, what are you doing in there?"

His answer was more thumping, quickly followed by more muttering, another, louder racket, and a sharp exclamation of aggravation. Rolling his eyes even as he felt his heartbeat pick up in worry, John tried the doorknob and found it open. Pushing the obstacle out of his way, he strode into the bedroom, on the lookout for whatever was amiss. A broken vase and table lamp lay on the rug in the middle of the room, the sources of the crashes; if not for the sunlight forcing its way through the window blinds, the room would have been completely dark. Going to the end of the bed, John looked behind the door that he had just entered and also craned his neck to peer into the bathroom. Sherlock was not in evidence.

"I'm down here," a familiar, low voice grumbled. The good detective sounded unnaturally winded, and his volume was even lower than usual.

Spinning around, John was already taking a step towards the far side of the bed before he actually looked down. Then he really saw what his flatmate was doing in the shadows on the floor. Halting, he blinked a couple of times, surveying the unlikely sight in disbelief. "Sherlock?"

There was a coffin beside the bed. Old fashioned and shaped from dark, nearly black wood, it was in the almost kite-shaped style that had characterized black and white American monster movies. John could see Sherlock's lower legs and feet, still clad in his pajama pants, but the rest of him was hidden from view by the huge wooden box. Since it had fallen on its front, one door was open, covering his thighs. It looked to be extremely heavy. Sherlock lay beneath it, trapped with its upper, wider half laying over his torso. Evidently, the thing had been standing on its end before the grumpy brunette had managed to tip it over on himself. Only a few dark brown curls were visible on the far side of the coffin, where his head was indubitably craning to see John over the enormous weight crushing him against the floor.

Coming slowly over to stand beside one long, lanky appendage in flannel, John questioned the merit of making a mummy joke against the threat of getting verbally dissected by the world's preeminent personal disassembler. After the hour he'd just had, some humor would have been welcome, but looking down, he saw a dark glint in Sherlock's eye that made him reconsider. His flatmate looked about ready to kill someone. Vowing to keep a straight face, therefore, John crouched down and took hold of the bottom corner of the glossy wood, lifting with his legs and sliding the burden downwards slowly. He didn't want to jar Sherlock's wounds if he didn't have to. Of course, that didn't mean that Sherlock didn't want to inflame a few injuries of John's. The doctor hoped that the boredom and pain wouldn't make Sherlock spiteful, but the ice-green glare that could still feel boring into the top of his head wasn't very encouraging.

Seeking to distract his flatmate before some biting remark could be made that might tempt him towards dropping the coffin and leaving Sherlock where he lay, John spoke up, "She knew you were there, you know."

"Who?" Sherlock sounded like he was barely concerned with receiving an answer.

"Ness." Pausing with the coffin over Sherlock's knees, John reminded him, "Our visitor from before. You know, the woman you saw when you were prowling outside the storage room?"

Sherlock's head perked up slightly, but then he let it drop back on the ground with a huffy sigh. "Oh, her. A governess and girl of all work for a public house in west Gloucestershire. Boring."

Of all the… The coffin was laid, forgotten, on Sherlock's legs. Sitting back in his heels, John rubbed his eyes with his forefinger and thumb, shaking his head wearily. Peeking at Sherlock through his fingers, he muttered incredulously, "I've spent over a year in this flat with you. How can you still make me feel like an idiot every day?"

"Easy. You _are_ an idiot," Sherlock muttered. "Which is something that we have already established, I believe. Keep _up_, John; you know that I hate repeating myself."

"Right. I know. Sorry," John muttered through gritted teeth, conceding only because he wanted to hear what Sherlock had to say about Ness. He'd hit the insufferable prick later.

"Being sorry doesn't make it any less tedious."

Grunting softly as he jarred his bandaged flesh, Sherlock pushed himself up on his elbows and scooted backwards until he was braced against the wall, managing to drag the heavy coffin on his legs with him when aided by a helpful nudge from John. The brunette had obviously taken the doctor's question as a request for an explanation—although, considering his mood, John was leery of any answers that he might receive. Sherlock, in his frustrated, static state, had all the charm of a grenade with the pin missing—and, though John could hate himself for it, he didn't care in the slightest.

Letting his head fall back against the wall, he regarded John with eyes so close to closing that he looked half asleep. Somehow still managing to look disdainful, the detective elucidated carelessly, "I could tell from the window that she was the ill-favored child of her family, was accustomed to heavy labor, and has a strong sentimental attachment to someone in the military, now deceased. As for her home and occupation, I didn't care enough to notice until your daring rescue pushed Mrs. Hudson into hysterics."

"Unbelievable."

Shaking his head in a mix of exasperation and admiration, John finished getting the coffin off of Sherlock and pulled his medical kit out of the dresser drawer where he had seen Sherlock stash it the week before. Moving to crouch between Sherlock and the bed, he braced himself so that he was sitting on the frame of it and flicked on the remaining wall lamp. With a gesture, he indicated for Sherlock to give him one bandaged hand, helped free it of the blue dressing gown's sleeve, and started unwinding the dressing. Sherlock winced as the fabric pulled away bits and pieces of him that had become attached to it. Well aware that each inch he pulled free hurt like hell, John wondered apprehensively about the likelihood that Sherlock would keep his pain to himself. It would probably be best to keep him distracted until his bindings were completely redone.

"What made you care, then, once you came downstairs?" he pursued, wondering if Sherlock would amaze or appall him with his answer.

He did both, naturally.

"Her injuries. They were her only striking feature, of course," the detective reflected, flinching as John finished with the bandage and began carefully inspecting and cleaning his burned skin with disinfectant. "Although her skills as an actress are admittedly formidable. When you first arrived outside and drew everyone's attention away from her, her posture was consistent with a sore back or shoulder, but as soon as she regained your focus, all traces of it were gone. I took no notice until I got closer and saw that she had numerous broken ribs as well as heavy, well-defined bruising. Taking that into account, her performance was slightly more than remarkable," he mentioned, infusing the word _slightly_ with so much sardonic contempt that John wouldn't have been surprised if Ness felt it and cringed, wherever she was.

"Well, you prefer crap telly to real acting anyway," the blond man muttered, defending Ness's unintended attempt at fooling the intolerable genius.

Sherlock gave him a look that could have skinned kittens and flexed his fingers experimentally. Had John not been so distracted by returning the haughty gray-green glare that his flatmate was directing his way, he might have stopped him, but…well, there really was no stopping Sherlock in anything. A bolt of pain from the detective's unwise act ricocheted up his arm, and the wrathful silver glower faltered. The brunette blanched enough that John bent his head hurriedly over his wounds rather than needle him more. Sherlock's hands were healing more quickly than he'd expected, but they still had a few days to go before he could go around making fists or fiddling with any of the oddly-assorted items in the flat that he was so fond of.

Sherlock was in no mood to be confronted by his unwanted humanity. To better ignore the pain sizzling on his nerve endings, he looked away from what the doctor was doing and went on in a voice that was half strangled, half contrary, "After she jumped out of the truck without showing any signs of pain, I began to suspect several different medical explanations, but your preoccupation when you reemerged for more boxes led me to suspect something more serious than my original hypothesis. Then, once I came downstairs and had determined that Mrs. Hudson's life was not in danger, it seemed like too much work to turn around and come back up here directly, so I waited. Your ever-so-enlightening conversation with our visitor in the storage room provided ample time to reevaluate her health and draw any further conclusions about her background."

"Which were?" Naturally, his flatmate had stayed and watched the talk in the storage room, despite that his flatmate made it clear that the conversation required privacy. John didn't even try to voice his objection to Sherlock's inconsiderate assumption that the rest of the world was there to entertain him. Some fights he was just incapable of winning.

He had finished putting fresh bandages on Sherlock's right arm and started unwrapping his left. It was on the far side of the detective's lean body, so John pulled away the stained cloth for as far as he could reach, bundled the soiled length of fabric up in his fist, and then motioned for his flatmate to get up so that they could both sit on the edge of the bed. Though Sherlock might consider scaling a flight of stairs as too much work, the doctor was not about to drape himself across the obnoxious misanthrope or contort himself around Sherlock's heavily-bandaged chest in order to reach the injuries that remained untreated. He was loathe to even help the man get out of his dressing gown, though he knew that exposing Sherlock's injuries was the only way for him to get at them. With the kind of week he'd been having, Mrs. Hudson had probably invited her friends back to the house. One of them would come in, see the two of them on the bed getting undressed, and then scurry away with an eyeful of all the wrong ideas.

Reluctantly obliging his request to relocate, Sherlock slumped onto the bed and rolled his eyes. "Oh _please_, John. Must we keep discussing something so dull? You make the deductions, if you're so interested. If you've learned anything at all while we've been living together, you should have known what to look for."

His acerbic tone was so expected that John became only slightly vexed with him. It was time to remind Sherlock of his less-than-advantageous position. Tugging a little more insistently on the bandages in his hand than was necessary, the good doctor hinted, "Well, _maybe_ if you a little less secretive about the _boring_ details I would just piss off and let you alone in here with your coffin and broken glassware."

A small breath hissed out between Sherlock's teeth as the threat of personal injury became real. Momentarily subdued, he turned to face the doctor more or less easily when John pushed on his right shoulder—it was the least injured part of his torso, barring the lower portion of his neck. Shrugging all the way out of his blue dressing gown to let his friend look at the swathes of fabric on his shoulder, he nevertheless remained silent.

"This arm seems worse than the other, for some reason," John remarked offhandedly. "I suppose I should use stronger disinfectant…"

"No!" Leaning as far away from the horrid idea as he could, Sherlock quickly weighed the merits of a boring conversation over a round of stinging, overly healthy ministrations. Apparently deciding that he'd rather satisfy his flatmate than get on the bad side of his doctor, he let out a little, put-upon sigh and conceded grumpily, "Oh, very well, I'll explain. If it's the only way to make you shut up."

"Sherlock…" The warning in John's voice was veering into the realm of dangerous.

Perhaps more quickly than he would have had John not been about to start dabbing antiseptic on his wounds, Sherlock looked away muttered at high speed, "Mid or late twenties, still lives at home. Her family that despises her. What? Why?" he asked himself mockingly, using the simpleton's tone of voice that he often utilized to represent the rest of the world's dozy populace. "Because she didn't buy her clothes; they're all ill-fitted and styled for a woman of a different size and age. From the quality, the original owner is well-off, but she's reduced most of what she's wearing to threadbare rags. Tightfisted? No. She's wearing a summer raincoat in zero-degree weather. No one's that careful about money. Obviously the people who provide her with clothes refuse to buy her adequate covering or replace what she wears out; moreover, she's been doing hard labor on less than three hours sleep a night for over a week: a hateful family.

"The martial attachment comes from her boots—army-issue, thirteen years old, and sized for a man of about six feet. Just like her jacket and trousers, she's used them excessively, but all the damage has been patched, cleaned, and lovingly taken care of. Her sentimental attachment is to her army boots, not the clothes from her current providers. Obviously, the giver of the boots is no longer in the family and most likely wouldn't give up expensive boots otherwise, so deceased.

"The rest is painfully obvious. Come to your own conclusions. I don't want to waste time with this anymore; her personality promises to be _exquisitely_ boring."

He had been speaking so fast that his words nearly blended together into one continuous baritone hum, but suddenly his whole demeanor was laced with irascibility. John sighed inwardly as the brunette glared at his flatmate and demanded, "Are you _done_ yet?"

Well, it had taken him a while to get stroppy, at least. The doctor supposed that he should be grateful for whatever non-combative time he could get out of Sherlock when he was in such a condition. Busy tying off the cloth that he'd just covered Sherlock's left shoulder with, he glanced up at him in weary vexation at the detective's demanding tone. "No. Stop slouching, I have to check the burns on your chest."

Sherlock sighed huffily, exhaling so forcefully that he ruffled his curly bangs. "They're fine," he growled defensively. "Leave it alone."

"Don't be a child," John admonished him. "I know what I'm doing, Sherlock."

"Relative to certain people, perhaps," he heard Sherlock mutter under his breath.

John made himself focus on unfastening the dressing. Only his understanding that Sherlock was acting out because he was in pain kept him from glaring up into his flatmate's pinched steel gaze—that and no small amount of obstinacy. He refused to get sucked in to the detective's childish snit. Plus, he simply lacked the energy to get any gloomier than he was. Not to mention that he couldn't afford to pout. He had the flat and its second occupant to look after—a task that was hard enough when he was feeling positive.

It really was a miracle that Sherlock hadn't died. The experiment that had made such a debacle of their flat had exploded directly into his chest while he was leaning over it to reach for a vial on the other side. Had the beaker that had held the bombastic mixture shattered into even slightly sharper projectiles than it had, John would be in the market for a new flatmate. Mercifully, it had only produced shards dangerous enough to leave medium to deep cuts, none of which were serious. Even more miraculously, for once Sherlock had thought to wear four of John's jumpers as a protective layer, so the force that had punched into his chest and sent him flying back into the sitting room had been mostly absorbed by the knitted material. The secondary explosions that had ruined the furniture were more or less harmless to the tall man, as he was lying halfway behind John's favorite armchair, but the acid that had stained his safety gear had eaten through the jumpers and gotten to the flesh of his torso and arms while he was still stunned.

John had arrived home just in time to discover Sherlock comatose and prevent the chemicals eating at his skin from sending him to the hospital—or further. He'd pressed for a visit to that institution anyway, but somehow Sherlock had kept the two of them at home. After how determined he had been to get the man to a place with real medical equipment, John still wasn't sure what happened there. It wasn't as if he often was, though, when Sherlock was involved. Persuasion was one of the brunette's deceptively well-rounded talents. Unfortunately, Sherlock's minor victory for his own convenience was a severe restraint for John's. The ex-army doctor had been up through the night watching over his flatmate, all the next day, and then again through the night.

It wasn't that the detective's life was obviously in danger. The burns, cuts, bruises, and abrasions were slight, when taken alone, yet as a whole they were far more than a stay-at-home attendant could or should attempt to treat. That censure was never far from John's thoughts as he moved self-consciously through the close atmosphere of the flat. Equally present was his sense of apprehension. Just thinking about the severity of the taller man's injuries made him tense and worried. The threat of a fever or infection was high for burns, and Sherlock was not the type to follow doctor's orders without being forced to. It really was more than one man could handle. He should have at least had Sherlock checked at a real hospital after the accident.

Then again, he'd spent a lifetime doing what he should never have been able to do.

Having finished ridding Sherlock's pale, thin chest of its binding, he nudged the detective down onto his back and bent over the mess on his chest. The normally alabaster skin was maimed. Reds, pinks, yellows, and browns fought in an ugly battle for dominance against the assaulted background. The sight brought John back to days when the only palette he knew was the confused, red-and-angry hues of violated tissue against the dry, neutral tones of desert land. The only variance had come from the chaotic starbursts of weapon fire that blossomed sporadically all around him. Those memories, as they often did, became slippery in his mind after a while—hard to hold at a distance and see as an objective viewer, difficult to retain in a platonic, sanity-preserving manner—so he discarded them, shifting his concentration to the next related topic that sprang into his mind.

Ness's had been in almost as god-awful shape as Sherlock. She still was, somewhere out there in the city. Or on her way home to Gloucestershire, according to his ever-observant patient.

"Good God, would you just shut up about the bloody girl already?" Sherlock complained, rolling his eyes disgustedly and fidgeting beneath the doctor's hands. He was paler than usual, perspiring, and taught as a bowstring. One of his knees was drumming nervously up and down, thrumming a soft beat of his bare heel against the floor in an expression of his entrapped energy.

Obviously, John's thoughts weren't as private as he'd expected them to be. A bit crossly, he frowned down at the three-going-on-thirty-three year-old and justified himself, "She was badly hurt, Sherlock. What do expect me to think about when I don't know if that will be remedied? I'm a doctor."

"Yes, and a fantastic one, at that," Sherlock gritted out. John was tending a particularly nasty area on his chest, one with burns layered over deep cuts, and the extra pain spoiled into bile in his over-stressed mind. "I'm sure she appreciated the care you took to give her the proper support while you waited to be left alone with her in Mrs. Hudson's back storage room." Ignoring the way that John stiffened at that insinuation, he sped on, "Tell me, was she enough of an armful, after Sarah? If the way your pupils dilated is anything to go by, you certainly thought that she was. With her skills as an actress, she could be _quite_ the entertainer. Maybe she got those bruises from someone who actually let her fall on the floor before he played ravening Prince Charming."

Such spleen was a little too much, even for him. "Sherlock," John growled threateningly, thinking of the bruises on Ness's neck and the tired pain in her blue eyes, "That's _enough_. She's a victim, not a puzzle. Be kind. Just, for one time in your life, be _kind_."

Sherlock scoffed, looking repelled. "_Why_? True kindness is useless. Practical kindness is a farce to get people to do what you want, and I want nothing from her. Besides, she was getting more than enough of it from _you_."

Oh, the unbelievable bastard. John's hand slipped when his fingers half-clenched into an instinctive fist. The rag dragged over tender burns before he could swallow his anger enough to correct himself. Sherlock jumped and hissed in response, a flash of true agony crossing his aquiline features. Instantly contrite, John jerked his hand back, opening his mouth to apologize. Unluckily for him, at his error his flatmate leapt wholeheartedly off the edge of civility. Flinching away from the doctor's halted ministrations, Sherlock shuddered dramatically and then growled in a reactionary burst of venom, "Honestly, with the way you were staring after her, maybe it's a good thing that Sarah's started seeing someone else."

Well, how was he supposed to respond to _that_? As the meaning of the words sank into John's mind, Sherlock pushed his hands away with his own gauze-wrapped appendages and wriggled sideways so that he could sit up on the edge of the bed. John let him, his face stone. Sherlock's words echoed in his head one more time, jangling discordantly as they bounced around and intersected with the thousand other repetitions that had gone before. _Sarah's started seeing someone else._ That single sentence, going on its merry way in circles inside his skull. And in Sherlock's caustic, condescending tone exactly. Dear, bloody Lord, sometimes he truly hated living with the man.

He didn't want to ask. He wished to God that he could avoid feeding the massive beast that was Sherlock's self-righteous tantrum and overblown ego. Still, the words came out, pulling past his lips with the sensation of broken glass and fishing hooks. Staring hard into the bright gray-green orbs that blazed at him, he demanded, "She's _what_?"

Rolling his eyes, Sherlock pushed up off the bed, prompting John to leap up with him and steady him when his lithe form swayed. Never one to miss an opportunity to avoid his flatmate's delaying tactics, he grabbed the roll of bandages while the detective was still recovering. With quick, neat movements, he stretched the cloth across the damaged area of Sherlock's chest, covering its disarray with a smooth expanse of white before Sherlock could regain enough steam to object.

To spite him for cutting in while he was reeling, Sherlock elaborate harshly, "She's moved on, that's what she's done." Squinting against the pain and stumbling a step, he went on in contempt, "Or regressed, if you will, back to dear old Terry from the university."

The doctor didn't want to believe him. He didn't want to listen to the voice in the back of his mind telling him that maybe the taller man was right, that he and Sarah had only really regarded their relationship in a casual way until recently, and that her lack of communication lately was all too supportive of Sherlock's claim. He wanted to stop thinking about how well he'd always got on with her, almost as well as he did with Sherlock—when he got on with Sherlock. He wanted to ignore the facts. Remain calm. Rationalize that Sherlock was in one of the worst moods that he'd ever seen him in and was liable to say hurtful things only to spread his misery around. Forget that the brunette never had to make things up in order to impart observations that were cutting.

He wanted to punch Sherlock in the face.

Hell.

Instead, John made himself lock down, fixing his gaze on the floor and fighting the violence inside of him down to a manageable level. Shaking his head to free it of the murder sizzling on its edges and flexing his hands to keep them from making tempting fists, John inquired of the bedframe, "How would _you_ know if she's going with someone else?" Then his shell cracked, and the heat burst through with alacrity. His anger catching fire again despite his efforts, he glared up at Sherlock and pointed out, "You don't even care enough to remember who's with _me_ most of the time."

Sherlock's lip curled. An accusatory tone was not the most intelligent approach to take in an argument with him. John was past caring, and that only made the other man more determined to break the doctor's shield of anger. "Why on Earth would I care about recalling something so unbelievably _unimportant_ for me to know?

Or, in other words, _Why on Earth would I care about_ you?

John didn't wait to hear any more. Turning on his heel, he rounded the bed and walked out. The sound of the door slamming in its frame behind him was darkly satisfying—it was about damn time that he got the last word in one of their arguments. Striding quickly down the landing and grabbing his coat from where he'd tossed it on the stair bannister on his way upstairs, he descended to the ground floor and shoved his way out the front door. He was practically vibrating with energy, he was so angry. And desperate to hit something. Preferably an item that Sherlock held particularly dear, like his nose. Or his skull. Or that ludicrous, godforsaken coffin that had magically appeared in his bloody room…

That sort of wishing was not productive. Suddenly more frustrated than he had even been before, the doctor heaved a sigh and fell back against the front door of 221 Baker Street. He was only getting himself worked up. Damn Sherlock and his childish strop. Damn himself for letting his own temper get set off by it. Damn coffins. Sighing again, John closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the black painted wood behind him. He took a long, deep breath. He counted to ten in his head as he let it out. Then, silently, he stood up off of the door, his hands fisted at his sides and his mouth set in a determined line.

He just needed to walk, he told himself, and distance himself from his flatmate's sulk for a while. Sherlock couldn't get into too much trouble if he was only gone an hour. …Well, hopefully he'd be too put out to really work up something horrible for the next sixty minutes. Rubbing his face tiredly, John stepped down off of the front stoop of his home and merged into the scanty traffic on the sidewalk, headed for the nearby park. God willing, he could afford to give himself an hour. One blessed hour. Then he would go home, bite his tongue, and get Sherlock through the rest of the week. He just needed a little time to prepare himself. Whoever the twisted bastards were who'd decided that his life would be perpetually difficult, they owed him that much.

The park was quiet at that time of the afternoon, populated only by those who were home early enough to beat the evening crowd and brave enough to face the fierceness of the weather. John kept his head down as he entered through the marble and wrought-iron gate, shoving his bare hands in his pockets to ward off the chill. His steps were even and measured out of habit, covering the pavement with expedience and lulling his throbbing head into a more meditative frame of mind. He rather liked having the outdoors all to himself; even the cold was almost worth enduring, if it meant that he had the freedom to wander where he liked without weaving through bodies or dodging pets. Almost.

The absence of his mittens sparked an image in his mind of Ness as she left, her blond, uneven hair waving slightly on her back as she turned the corner. Thanks to that line of thought, Sherlock's derisive analysis of her entered his head unwanted, and he grimaced down at the tops of his shoes. At least _one_ of the residents of 221B had done the poor woman a service that day. His mittens couldn't have found a greater purpose if he'd worn them in Antarctica. Glancing up absently as he passed a small gazebo, he was distracted by a bright flash of red from within the hedge that partially enclosed it. He paused beside a tree trunk to determine the source of the cheery color, expecting a bird of some sort to come flitting out of the bare branches.

The only avian he saw was a swan, embroidered in white thread on the back of a winter coat. There was a pair of women in the circle of winter-bare shrubbery, standing close together and talking. They had their backs to him, but their heads were inclined towards each other, and he could tell by the faint movements of their profiles that they were speaking earnestly. For lack of anything better to do, he remained where he was to look a bit longer. It wasn't as if he was eavesdropping on their conversation from that distance, and he was happy for any sort of distraction at that point.

They seemed very friendly. The one with a swan on her coat had strawberry-blond hair, which she'd swept back into a long braid down her back, and she was petite in a way that would make anyone that stood next to her seem tall. Her companion was a brunette, clad in a white, thigh-length jacket and a matching winter hat. It was her hand that was red—covered in a mitten that was the source of the bright, cardinal color that had caught John's eye—and she swung it loosely at her side as she listened to the blond, her other hand holding carelessly onto her handbag.

As John was just thinking about walking on, she burst into laughter at something her friend had said. John stilled once more and turned back quickly, his eyes on her wide smile and affectionate eyes, which he could see since she'd turned. All casual thoughts of leaving had left his head. He didn't know what to think about what he was seeing.

Sarah was happy and boisterous, her face flushed with cold and her whole attention focused on the small woman beside her. After going over a week without seeing her, the doctor was struck by how familiar her laugh remained to him. He'd have known it from across the park. An unwelcome thought intruded—would Sarah be able to recognize the sound of his voice in a similar situation? Something told him that it was _not_ the right time for him to ask her.

Unaware of her audience, the taller woman slipped her red mitten into the blonde's black glove, clasping it just as easily and fondly as any close friend might. The smaller female said something, and Sarah broke out laughing again, holding her stomach to contain her brevity. Breathlessly, she giggled, "Terry! You didn't!"

John didn't hear Terry's answer. As Sarah leaned in to hear it, the smaller woman took the opportunity to steal a kiss, and he made himself move on before she finished stretching up on her toes. Jaw tightening, he traversed to the far side of the park, where there were plenty of winter-stripped trees and bushes to block any possible view of the happy couple. And he'd thought to get away from the man lurking back in 221B, the doctor thought bitterly. But no. The blasted man was everywhere. Once again, he'd been unable to escape the fact that Sherlock was right. And once again, the proof of it had come at the expense of something that John had held dear.

Sarah. She'd looked very happy with her secret lady friend. Carefree. Uninhibited. Just how he had begun to feel with her. Unable to take the cruel irony of it anymore, John left the park and headed home, eager to put space between him and the memory of his chest imploding. What a bloody awful day. His head hurt. His disposition hovered on the edge of depression or pure rage. He was exhausted, his charming memory of Ness's gratitude had been ruined by his dishonest girlfriend's—his bisexual, dishonest girlfriend's—date out in the park with her not-so-ex-partner, and his hands were cold, bugger it.

He hated Sherlock, and boredom, and winter. He hated the bright, cherry red wool that had been overlaid over the blue in his memory. Damn his luck. Damn the whole day. Ness's smile as she took his gift flashed in his mind, covered up with Sarah's grin as she held hands with little Terry. John scowled, ducking his head and walking faster towards home.

Damn mittens.


	6. Chapter 5

**A/N: Hello. This is Knyle Borealis, the author. I'm finally figuring out how to make friends with this site, so please bear with me if any of the formatting/structural stuff doesn't make sense. I'll keep editing.**

This is my First Fanfiction Ever. I love Sherlock and John with a passion that started back when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was the only authority on the subject (not meaning to exclude Jeremy Brett, Basil Rathbone, or any of those other wonderful people who brought my hero to life), and ever since my seven-year-old self picked up a volume of "A Study in Scarlet," I have been in love with the world of Sherlock Holmes.

It's not Brit-picked AT ALL, so I apologize. I welcome any feedback that you feel like giving, nice or no, so please comment!

**Disclaimer—****_none of this is mine! _Okay, well, a wee bit of it may be mine… (Blood, Sweat, and Tears included) but all of the good stuff definitely belongs to Doyle, Moffat, and Gatiss. I thank them greatly.**

I hope you enjoy it.

**Note: I was extremely, extremely nervous about writing from Sherlock's POV. How am I supposed to pretend to be a genius without everyone knowing that I most definitely am not? Oh! I know! Fall back on the fact that Sherlock is so damn sure of himself that no one questions him anymore, anyway. ...Or just bang my head against the wall and try to explain why he says what he does...**

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As soon as the front door closed behind his flatmate, Sherlock threw himself to the floor beside his bed, lunging halfway beneath it and casting about blindly in the dark space. Biting back on his urge to shout something unrepeatable when his chest met the carpet, he searched the shadows madly until his waving hands met with resistance. His fingers smacked into a corner of cold metal; there ended his effort to keep from swearing. Nevertheless, his hands remained determined, and he latched onto his catch eagerly.

God, it hurt. The burns that he'd suffered made him feel someone was tearing off strips of his skin with a pair of pliers. They'd been incurred during a routine experiment with non-combustive chemicals, a test for determining a substance's chemical properties that he had conducted uncountable times before. He had already determined in the aftermath that his materials had been tampered with. However, since the traffic of buffoons in the flat had been thick—thanks to a con-fab of Lestrade's imbecilic employees, a number of clients, and miscellaneous visitations from his brother Mycroft's men—the number of suspects on his list was staggering. Also, all the physical evidence had been destroyed with the explosion, and the time frame in which the corruption could have taken place was indeterminate due to the fact that he hadn't used the rigged chemicals in weeks.

It was a mystery that could be sidelined for the moment. He had a matter much more pressing on his mind. A few muttered curses and a good deal of fumbling later, Sherlock was gratified to see a small red light wink on signaling his success with only seconds to spare. He'd only barely flipped the right switch before the light indicated that the device had been put into use. Certain that he needn't waste any more time below the bed, he abandoned his concealed find, clambered breathlessly to his feet, and hurtled out of his bedroom, catching haphazardly on the door frame and walls to keep from falling on his way.

Lurching through the sitting room to one of the front windows, he watched John's hunched shoulders out of sight, scanning the sidewalk in all directions with his bright eyes. His hands and chest felt like they were on fire, but Sherlock didn't actually notice nor care. Finally, finally, finally, he had brainwork to do; he wasn't about to let his dealing with it become hampered by his stupid transport's malfunction. He was awake, alive, aware—more energized than he had been in three long, agonizing days.

The street was empty. No people, autos, or anything else of interest. Considering the circumstances, he should probably consider that fact a boon. Still…_boring_. With a disgusted sigh, he shoved away from the glass and sprinted for windows with a view out the back of the building. His thoughts whirred: shifting, reorganizing, and flying off in all directions without distracting him in the slightest. Without something of note to keep him occupied, the chaos was maddening, but whenever his interest was caught that changed. He'd discovered that the multi-avenue thought process was nearly tolerable when he put it to work on things like mysteries or complex observations. In all truth, he'd never quite grown to enjoy it, but his head was a far better place than it used to be—certainly more useful than in his younger years.

The window in his bedroom was glued shut with an epoxy that he had been testing for a case three months before, and he had painted the panes black while he was conducting experiments with photosensitive chemicals. Bounding up the stairs instead without a moment's further thought, he entered John's bedroom, which had the privilege of the only bay window in 221 Baker Street and therefore was a far better option for viewing the whole of the alley below.

Thanks to those rowdy sidetracks that his mind entertained, he'd hardly had to think about where he was going at all. They'd answered his question of where to find a vantage point before he really even finished deciding that he had it. Of course, as far as occupation went, the activity that such problem solving had taken was miniscule—milliseconds of brainwork had elapsed as he crossed the sitting room into the hall, if anything. Only the most intriguing of cases could ever really engage his full faculties. That was why he sought such puzzled out. Being subjected to mundane thought on a regular basis threatened to make a proper nutter out of him.

As he passed the threshold, his neat surroundings were a blur in the periphery of his vision, yet he missed no details of John's familiar dwelling. There was the tidily made bed and the various items spread in an orderly fashion around the room, reminiscent of John's time in the military. The ever-constant jumper lain over the back of his desk chair. Two portraits of his parents and sister in the modest folding frame on his dresser. Miscellaneous other minutiae. Sherlock had noticed long before that his flatmate kept his things simple and clean. It was something that he was in favor of, since it allowed for a more streamlined analysis of him and a quicker detection of any interesting changes.

On that note, an errant observation clicked into place in his mental map of the space; the bed was untouched. Evidently, the smaller man hadn't slept in the room for the last two days. Sherlock hadn't realized. That irked him a bit. Coming to the window, he threw aside the drapes and pressed his nose to the cool glass, eyes on the alley two stories below. Though in his casual overview of his friend's bedchamber he'd allowed for some amount of mental laxity, he focused every optical and mental faculty that he had on the sight below. He was looking for one sort of evidence in particular, and within ten seconds his keen eyes had alighted on it.

"Yes!" he breathed, happier to see his find than most people were to see long-lost loved ones. The crumpled bundle of dirty brown fabric was tucked in between some discarded boards, very close to where he had expected it to be.

Whirling around, he flew out of the room and down to the ground floor. Mrs. Hudson's collection of china figurines watched in wary bemusement as he exited through the building's back door and went sprinting into the alleyway. Slowing down slightly to avoid missing anything, he swept the whole area with his piercing gaze, seeking out more clues that were perhaps too small to be discovered while behind glass. From the pavement, the hidden material that he'd seen at a distance was out of sight. No matter. He'd memorized its exact location in the wood pile anyway. Without a moment's hesitation, Sherlock strode up to the small hill of boards concealing it and moved them carefully and quickly aside, crouching over the unassuming little parcel that his digging revealed.

Looking it over excitedly, he catalogued as much information as he possibly could before turning his attention to the more practical, pertinent issue that he faced: how to keep it from exploding in his face.

It was a bomb, of course. He'd known that the moment he saw it from John's room—before that, actually. Wrapped in the brown uniform worn as a disguise by the contract killer who'd brought Mrs. Hudson's flour, the explosive device was one of the more unassuming that he'd encountered, impressive for its deceptive appearance. He could still smell the cheap Russian vodka—mass produced and so widely distributed that tracking down the bomb-maker through its origin would be next to impossible—that the huge man had poured on the fabric to make his façade more convincing. The giant had done well in placing it and making it. It was small and compact, designed specifically for the simple job of exploding through the wall of the shop's storage room and killing everyone who had been inside of it when the activation code was sent to it via mobile phone.

Which had been approximately four minutes, twenty-six seconds earlier.

At the exact moment that the brooding Dr. Watson had passed from the danger zone of its minimum blast radius.

Someone was trying to kill Baker Street's smaller, kinder inhabitants. Someone who had gone out of his way to keep from killing the building's tallest resident.

Unbeknownst to the criminal or any of Sherlock's preoccupied housemates, however, the brunette had in his possession a small, useful device with which one could jam the signals of any mobile devices in the area. He'd nicked it out of Anderson's car after a particularly annoying case with the police scientist; he wanted to get him in trouble for losing police property. It was one of the few times that he actually took something from official custody—not counting his collection of Lestrade's identification badges, of course.

He often 'misplaced' equipment that had been entrusted to the obnoxious forensic scientist to get back at him for being stupid, but the signal jammer had been too inviting. It seemed a shame to simply stop at relocating it to somewhere else that was reasonably close to Anderson's possession, so he'd appropriated it for his own use. It was up in Sherlock's room at that very moment, humming monotonously under his bed. The red light shining on its surface signaled that a call was actively being blocked: the deadly phone signal that would, upon reaching its intended recipient, rid London of a fifth of a city block and its only Private Consulting Detective.

Sherlock had gone to activate it the moment that he'd glanced out the back window of Mrs. Hudson's kitchen and seen the deliveryman from the front walk lurking in the alley. He'd been helping himself to Mrs. Hudson's plate of fresh scones, which she'd unwisely left unsupervised. The only sort of food that he actually enjoyed eating came from either a Chinese restaurant or the elderly woman's oven. It was sheerest happenstance that he happened to look up when he did and spot the trespasser. Having nothing better to do, then, the brunette watched the large man while he ate. Just as with the annoying blond female that John was so preoccupied with—Nell, or Nicky, or something—a closer inspection of the stranger was far more enlightening than the study that he'd made from afar.

Peering through his landlady's lace curtains at the furtive giant of a man, the detective was taken aback when his brain made a connection between the sight of him and the most entertaining inner repository of information that his considerable mind maintained: his criminal databank. He was watching his back alley be invaded by a villain in disguise. Though the ominous stranger had indeed prepared for his drunken pretense by indulging in drugs, his pupils had shown signs of use of a stimulant, not a depressant like alcohol. People didn't get high and then pretend to be drunk unless they were up to something sublimely stupid. His interest caught, Sherlock had actually put some effort into his looking. It was very serendipitous that he had, too. The stains and marks on the deliveryman's hands were telltale signs of bomb making, and Sherlock had taught himself to recognize the signs of a killer-for-hire before he'd even gone into the consulting detective business.

It was no surprise that Anderson had rubbed off on the signal jammer enough to make it dangerously unlucky. While the deliveryman made a sneaky exit, Sherlock had bolted up the stairs and made a dive for the machine. In his haste to reach it, though, he'd knocked the fugitive gold miner's coffin over on himself, trapping him on the floor without any way to warn John or stop the villain. The jammer was just out of his reach, as well, so he hadn't even been able to turn it on. When he tried to reach it, his infernal, clumsy fingers had only knocked it farther away from him. Worse, neither the ruckus of the coffin toppling nor the din he'd made thereafter in an attempt to rouse the suspicions of the people downstairs had succeeded. Giving up on the prospects of his reaching their ears from his bedroom then, he'd settled in for a maddening wait.

After another fifteen minutes of lying there beside his bed, waiting for either the sounds of those closest to him dying a combustive death or an anticlimactic meeting with his flatmate, Sherlock's uncontrollable energy and exasperation had begun to ferment into a concoction of anger, anxiety, and restlessness. It was even worse than what he'd felt after being bored for days on end—something that he had never experienced before. He didn't know how to respond to the alien sensations of worry, especially not the surge of relief that had overcome him when he heard John calling for him in the flat. The remembrance that Mrs. Hudson's schedule had also taken her away from the storage room only made him feel more inanely pleased.

Repelled by the startlingly plebian emotions that the knowledge of his friend's safety brought on—and also mindful that there was likely a deadly device on the premises—Sherlock had sacrificed a vase and lamp in short order. He'd wanted to get John into the room so that he could send him completely out of the danger area. His plan had the added benefit of allowing him to vent his frustration over his rebellious emotions. Before he could put it into effect, however, the bloody things insisted on making him feel happy to see the blond head that poked apprehensively around the door jamb. Such subordination was next to enraging, and in the whirlwind that his brain had become without stimulation, anger was like a match to multiple very short fuses.

Somewhat regrettably, his annoyance and the pain that John's well-meant tending had created paired badly. On top of his utter desperation for brain work, the effects of the concoction were enough to make his performance little too convincing. After getting caught up in his theatrics, it had slipped his mind to have the doctor get the jammer out and turn it on, and he hadn't meant to tell John about Sarah. He was going to keep the information to himself in an attempt to exercise the "common decency" that the doctor seemed so fond of. It was an emblematically tedious display of manners, but John had been unprecedentedly kind to him during the year that they had been living together. Even Sherlock, with his earnest eschewal of sentiment, wasn't too oblivious to see it.

He'd thought to express his gratitude by at least partially falling in with the humdrum idea of courtesy, but it couldn't last. Oh, well. He'd hypothesized from the beginning that concerning himself with a show of any sort of consideration would fail to yield positive results, and so it had. A lot of effort for nothing; he'd cocked it up after barely one row. Not that his failure was especially disappointing. John seemed to like him well enough when Sherlock went about his business without enacting the wearisome charade of politeness, and Sherlock much preferred the less difficult path of simply deeming the whole world beneath notice. Not to mention that the merits of a practice in which success could not be rewarded because his efforts were not known of were at best still dubious to him. It was more than time for him to discard the whole trial.

What a perfectly impractical thing to think about when he had a live bomb sitting outside his home. Tossing aside the mental clutter about John that had accumulated unsolicited, Sherlock bent closer to the deadly package that he'd uncovered. He had other matters to consider. Like how to disarm the device when he could hardly move his fingers. Frowning deeply over the conundrum, he scanned the surrounding debris for likely tools. If he could find a stick that was strong and narrow enough, he could probably use it to at least rid the weapon of its outer covering. He caught sight of a thick-gauge wire amongst the debris beside him. It would be more than suitable to the task. It was, however, wedged underneath the edge of a large board, which was buried under several additional boards of commendable size and heft.

Typical.

Giving the meddlesome pile a hateful look, Sherlock attempted to pull the wire out from underneath it. As he'd expected, the effort yielded no result. His fingers were too weak to grasp the thin object, and the bandages on them could gain no purchase on such smooth metal. His lip curling, he steeled himself and brought his hand to his face. Using his teeth, he managed to free several fingers of their fabric confinement. By the time he finished with that, though, he was lightheaded with pain and breathing hard. Pushed to a physical state of discomfiture that he was quite unaccustomed to, he had to bite his lip to keep from making any sort of embarrassing, useless noises as he tried to get the wire loose one more time.

It came free of its wooden prison at last, and he turned back to the bomb without preamble. He could celebrate his achievement later, when there was no chance of John or Mrs. Hudson returning before he ensured that their home wasn't about to be blown to smithereens. Gritting his teeth so hard that the muscles in his jaw ached, the tall brunette painstakingly teased the delivery uniform off of its contents. It was slow, stultifying work, but he didn't waver for a moment, easing the covering out of the way determinedly. When finally he had revealed the metal beneath, he paused to let himself to catch his breath. The next bit would require the utmost precision, and, as much as he hated to admit it, his body wouldn't be up to it without a recovery period.

Thinking bitterly of how much more efficiently his intellect could function if it had none of the existential packaging of his body bogging it down, the battered detective counted off exactly twenty five seconds. By then, his breathing was more measured, and his pulse had stopped all the incessant, aggravating pounding in his ears. After that, he refused to allow himself any more time to indulge in debility. Focused, he made a quick study of the bomb's components. Complex but straightforward design, military grade explosives, professional assembly. Simple to deactivate, if the diffuser had passable dexterity and was in full possession of his or her fine motor skills. Not so simple when one only had three fingers, a piece of wire, and a mostly dysfunctional set of appendages.

Energized by the challenge after such an agonizingly long dry spell, Sherlock bent eagerly to his task, carefully ridding the bomb of the housing over its control wires. It was a similar setup to one that he'd seen before; he made sure to keep on top of the latest developments in explosive design and had a back log of various schematics from the past five years or so. Mapping out the disarmament procedure in his mind, he adjusted his grip on the wire. It only hurt tremendously. Biting back a heavy sigh of exasperation, the detective shoved the pain into the small box in his mind that he reserved for the most detrimental of his emotions and most of the burdensome information that his body collected about its functions. Once inserted there, very few sensations ever lasted long enough to reemerge.

Wielding the wire was a clumsy process at first, but after a few hesitant maneuvers, he fell into a rhythm. He had the bomb diffused within four minutes. Not a personal best, but considering his handicap, he was mostly gratified. Feeling his lips quirk upwards into a small, triumphant smile, Sherlock sat back on his heels and regarded his work admiringly. John would call him out for being so smug. The brunette made the mental argument that with the set of personal skills that he had, being egotistical was only natural. It wasn't as if there was anyone else who could do what he did.

It was a view that he kept to himself a majority of the time. He saw no fault in bringing it up, since it was true, but John was always touchier and more indignant when he won arguments that way. Sherlock was happy to just ignore him when he was like that, as long as the blond man's mood didn't stray too close to melancholy. Oddly enough, he couldn't stand it when the blond doctor got gloomy after they had a row. Riled he could take, and irritated was a given on most days. John never stayed angry for long, though, and he never made his flatmate feel like he held it against him personally. When he was sad, however, Sherlock began to feel like something was inherently wrong with his sociopathic nature, high-functioning or not, for instilling actual unhappiness in his only friend.

Oh, for the love of—

Grimacing, the detective found himself distracted once again and berated himself. The mental tangents were getting ridiculous. Obviously, his mind had gone too long without containing anything of value. It was starting to fill the void with gibbering idiocy. As he siphoned out real thought from the commonplace muck in his head, he poked through the bomb's pieces absently. Its layout was textbook, almost exactly the same as the examples that police experts had shown him. He could have done the work with his eyes closed, if not for a few particulars in the layout.

The small black box with the mobile phone signal receiver was nearly 2.5 times larger than required. When he turned it over with his makeshift utensil, he could see an amount of hardware behind the ill-fitted metal plate that completed the box's sixth side that was incongruous with what was necessary. His question was, if the bomb maker had gone through so much trouble to make his creation akin to the standard in all other aspects, why deviate in something so easy to obtain as a cheap mobile phone's signal components? Studying the small rectangle intently, he considered the motives behind such a choice and commenced to pry at the metal cover with the wire.

A secondary piece of equipment could have been used to ensure that the blast signal was received even if the first was defective, he surmised. In that case, the mobile jammer would prevent either of them from fulfilling their purpose. Managing to twist the wire underneath the edge of the casing, he fiddled around with it until an edge came loose. A quick twist of his wrist popped it free, but the small clatter that it made when it fell onto the ground was lost in his labored gasping. He'd forgotten to favor his damaged body. The shockwaves of pain that he had treated himself to as a result swept up and down his arm and torso a few times, stinging in a number of uncomfortable places. A bit weakly, therefore, his train of thought persevered, pointing out that there could be a timed activation device, or one that was set off by tampering with the bomb, or a physical switch—

Or a mechanism devoted entirely to _stopping_ the bomb from exploding when a second mobile signal was sent.

Tapping the wire in his hand in a staccato march on the pavement, Sherlock stared at the opened black box in consternation. A kill switch. The bomber had built in a kill switch. Which meant that the bomb was only intended to go off if a certain set of parameters were met and _cancelled_ if they weren't. It may not have been planted solely to cause unmitigated, impartial destruction. Perhaps not even meant to kill its true target. Brow furrowing, he crouched tensely over the bemusing piece of electronics and let his thoughts race, grasping at any plausible explanation that came his way.

First, he discarded all thoughts of coincidence. It was much simpler and very often more accurate if he assumed that whatever had happened had been meant to. Therefore, since the bomb had not been blown, it there was no intention for it to explode. An odd goal for a bomb, but there must've been a reason for the unorthodox aim to be. Assuming that, whatever the device's real ambition was, it had not already failed: what had it accomplished? Critically, Sherlock weighed the situation, so far removed from his own situation that he felt like an observer of a television show or a reader of a case report. What had the bomb done?

It had gotten him outside.

It had driven him to send John on his way and reset Mrs. Hudson's clocks so that she left early for her appointment with friends.

It had refrained from redoing the work that the chemical explosion had done already to his arms and chest—make him vulnerable.

Or had it? Certainly there were numerous types of vulnerability. A particularly stupid person could even get manipulated into displaying more than one type of it at once. Take an idiot like him, for instance:

Alone, injured, and with no place to hide in a secluded, empty alley.

Suddenly, the full implications of the situation that he'd placed himself in became clear. Realizing the threat of a trap, the detective leapt to his feet, shooting to the door into 221. He tried the handle. It had locked behind him. Begrudgingly beginning to reevaluate the virtue of sending John away so angry that he probably wouldn't answer his phone if Sherlock called him, the detective remembered that his mobile was indoors anyway and moved happily away from the moment of regret. He would just have to walk around the building and enter through the front door. In nothing but cotton pajama trousers and his dressing gown. When John had undoubtedly locked the threshold behind him anyway. _Drat_. Thinking of the fire escape, Sherlock turned away from the door with a scowl.

The blur of motion in the corner of his right eye was the only warning he had before a fist connected with his face. He managed to jerk away at the last second to ensure that the blow was only glancing, but with a man the size of a phone booth attacking him, even a glancing blow was overpowering. Feeling like he'd been hit in the head with a crowbar, Sherlock stumbled back into the wall, his head ringing. The bomber had returned. Stupidly, the lean brunette had neglected to search the area for danger before assuming that he had time enough to escape, giving the enormous killer-for-hire plenty of time to creep up behind him and into striking range.

It was a deadly mistake. He couldn't' believe that he'd been so remiss. Could he have been lost in the chaos of his mind so long that his practical senses had atrophied? He hoped not. He'd go mad if he had to go through the troublesome business of building them up again. It had taken him a lifetime to reach his current level of sociable, and his senses of place and timing were still considered to be incredibly below average. Oh, good God. _Why_ was his head so hard to keep focused?

As the detective was reeling, his attacker pressed the advantage, not injured in the slightest and happy to exploit his target's impairment. Sherlock couldn't keep his eyes trained on anything; the shapes in his vision were warped, swimming, and disassociated with any sort of sense. It was a miracle that he saw the next blow coming. The brick of 221's back wall had scarcely scraped his back before he had to throw himself out of the way of another punch, ducking under the other man's arm. As he did so, his equilibrium and sight snapped back into focus, and he transformed his dodge into a spinning kick to the giant's kidney. Torqueing his body, he struck the spot on the man's lower back with his bare heel, just beside his spine.

He hit his mark perfectly. With a groan, the behemoth dropped to one knee, twisting around to face the detective just in time to catch Sherlock's next kick with his nose. Blood spurted, and the brunette's opponent roared. Lunging to his feet, he swung wildly at the smaller man, sending Sherlock dancing backwards out of range. One swing managed to find its mark as he fled, slamming into white fabric with the force of a cannon ball. All the air left Sherlock's lungs in a gust. He blocked the next blow with his arms, sliding it off to the side where it could do no major damage and sparking up agony in his limbs in the process.

With his injuries, he wasn't going to last much longer. Taking another hit on the shoulder, the detective tripped on an overturned garbage bin. He saw stars as he stumbled. Fire. His body was on fire. Gasping for air, he tried to dart towards the mouth of the alley, but the assassin cut him off, his eyes glowing murderously. Coupled with that bone-chilling look, the blood from his nose running freely down his face and neck made him look demonic. Good for him. Sherlock didn't believe in the supernatural. The massive oaf was a man—granted, a healthy, colossal man—and if he wasn't going to get out of the way, then Sherlock would make him.

His roundhouse kick to the brute's jaw was evidently unexpected. Without making any effort to stop the attack, the contract killer took the hit directly in the face and went staggering back, nearly tripping over the same bin that Sherlock had. Unable to use his arms, the detective had to follow up with another kick. He aimed to take out a knee, hoping to end the fight quickly, but his enemy recovered more quickly than he'd anticipated. One massive, meaty hand came up and closed around his ankle just before contact, and for the first time in his life, Sherlock Holmes was literally swept off of his feet.

The surge of motion and the air rushing past his face were so disorienting that he didn't think to protect himself until the last moment. Then the pavement and the sides of Mrs. Hudson's bins loomed up in his vision, and the flying man had only enough times to throw his hands up in front of his face before impact. There was a horrendous crash and ruckus as he hurtled straight into the garbage receptacles. His forearms and shoulder took the brunt of his weight, sending starbursts of agony through him in waves that were so intense that he cried out.

In answer, a deep, grating chuckle came from somewhere above him, and a booted foot gave him a harsh kick in the ribs. In a surge of spiteful pride, Sherlock bit down hard on the urge he felt to shout and let the hit roll him over onto his back without a sound. Before he had completely settled flat, however, a knee came down onto the middle of his chest, expelling his breath with the force of a rugby tackle. It and nearly eked out another involuntary cry, the giant setting all his weight on him, but the brunette was stubborn enough to remain quiet.

Holding the injured man down thus, the goliath reached for the belt of Sherlock's dressing gown. He yanked it free and wrapped either end of the cord around his hands, shortening it until he had a length in the middle suitable for a garrote. The choking attempt that came next was easy for Sherlock to anticipate; the thug ended up smashing him in the head with both fists when all efforts to get the cord around the brunette's neck were fought off. The detective was to slow in recovering from the blow. While he was still dazed, he felt the thick cloth of the belt being wound around his neck. Not good. Before it could tighten, he made himself wake up and slammed both his arms into the fronts of the killer's elbow joints, forcing his arms to buckle.

Sherlock paid no heed to the blood trickling down his temple or matting the back of his hair. Shoving his attacker's hands aside while his arms screamed faintly in agony, he sent his knee up into the other man's groin and bucked out from underneath the weight crushing his chest as its brutish owner was still wincing. Adrenaline was dulling his hurts, making everything inside him work infinitesimally faster. It seemed that fighting for one's life was invigorating enough to make even a body as bruised and damaged as his feel up to physical effort. No wonder he enjoyed high stakes situations so much.

As he scrambled up onto his knees to escape, he felt a hand close around his leg. The assassin squeezed down on his calf with bone-bruising force, yanking him sideways and sending him tumbling over the pavement. Unable to stop himself, he collided with a fallen board and bounced into the back wall of 221 with a sickening thud. Just like that, the adrenaline was overridden, and his pain returned in a rush. Groaning, Sherlock rolled slowly onto his back, shoving the bins and their fallen lids off of himself. While his thoughts sought to gather, he blinked warily up at the hulking figure of his foe. As the titan got painfully to his feet, Sherlock felt bodily state shift; unfortunately, it seemed to become completely opposite its previous one.

Suddenly, he was in so much pain that he was almost numbed by it. That imperviousness would have been helpful, he supposed, had he the strength left to exert himself. As it was, he doubted that he even had the vigor to pull his arms up to guard against another blow. Unless something changed very soon, his prospects for surviving were looking dim. As were most other things in his world. The kick to his ribs and subsequent knee to his sternum had knocked all of the air out of him, and he couldn't seem to get enough breath back into his lungs to ward off the blackness that threatened at the edges of his vision.

Heavy steps approached; then a hand closed around the front of his dressing gown, clasping tightly around the cord that still clung to his neck. Sherlock felt a jerk and a rush of air as he was lifted up off of the ground, and then his spine cracked loudly as it was rammed into the back wall of his home. Blinking, he watched the criminal's snarling face shift in and out of focus in front of him. His body's inability to gain consistency was tiresome, to say the least. The disparity between what he saw then and his normal perfect vision was galling. He forgot to be irked, though, when something sharp and cold pressed against his neck.

Metal, worked into a razor's sharpness. Six inch length, gently curved edge on the side pressing against him. A knife.

The same deep, gravelly voice that he'd heard chuckling before hissed in his ear, "Hold still and I won't yank your throat out."

Deciding that the thick-headed giant would be too stupid to understand an explanation on the correct verb to use when one had a knife in his hand, Sherlock immediately stopped struggling. He couldn't have kept it up much longer anyway, and he preferred being forced to cease and desist at knifepoint over succumbing to exhaustion. Call it pride. He didn't care.

John would probably do the same thing.

Unaware of the disoriented direction that Sherlock's thoughts had taken, the detective's attacker shifted his grip on the belt and blue dressing down, cutting off a good amount of Sherlock's air and pushing his knuckles into the bandages at his collar bone. With his face twisted into a leer ugly enough that even his mother had probably learned to hate him for it, he growled, "That's better. Now listen to me carefully, Mr. Holmes, and I won't take too long killing you."

Because he so obviously was able to do _anything_ else besides stand there and pay attention, Sherlock drawled in his head. And what was the point in sharing information with someone whom you soon expected to be dead? And at your own hands, no less. Rolling his eyes and raising his eyebrows in scorn, Sherlock nearly pointed out the big man's inefficiency when he remembered the knife waiting at his Adam's apple. Even if Sherlock was right, there really was no winning an argument that ended in his throat being cut. Not to mention, he was in a particularly bad state of health at the moment. There was no need to provoke the ogre holding him into further worsening his condition. Therefore, for the first time in his life, he held his tongue. Though it did take some work, he managed to keep his retort to himself.

Instead of voicing it, he murmured quietly, "I'm listening."

"Good." Shifting his weight restlessly from foot to foot, the big man shot a glance towards the empty alley mouth and then another towards the deserted rest of the causeway that ran between the city buildings. Licking his lips, he restated, "Good."

With the fight more or less over, Sherlock took the time to really look at the ugly fellow. As he'd noticed before, the other man's pupils were hugely dilated, and his behavior seemed to be verging on erratic. Adrenaline aside, the man was definitely on something. Its influence was likely behind his speedy recovery from Sherlock's attacks and the viciousness with which he administered his own. There was a definite danger that he was unbalanced in more ways than that, and if the drug were bad enough, a precipitous descent into delusions and unreasonable emotion was imminent.

Wonderful. If only he could get the simpleton to convey his message and then figure out some way to get rid of him before that cliff's edge was breached. Like most of the world's imbecilic populace, though, expediency seemed beyond the man's limited grasp. Sherlock sighed huffily inside his head. Honestly. Was he doomed to die at the hands of so insufferable a fool? Wasn't living with a planet full of them enough? What was he being punished for, anyway? The brunette felt a brief flash of self-righteous exasperation, and he didn't care how out of place the sentiment was under the circumstances.

It was with a slight edge of vexation in his voice, then, that the detective hinted, "You had something to tell me?"

Seeming to shake himself out of a daze, the man glared at him and snapped, "Shut up. Yes." Digging the tip of the knife a little further into the skin of his immobile victim's throat, he got a faraway look in his eye and recited somewhat glassily, "You should have let me kill you the first time around, Sherlock Holmes. I was going to make it easy on you, but now I've decided to play with my food." Coming back to himself, the hit man looked down at him and added helpfully, "You won't like it."

Sherlock pursed his lips. "You set the bomb to kill John and Mrs. Hudson in order to…play with me?"

The man blinked glassily. "Who… No. I'm supposed…it was supposed to kill you."

Sherlock nearly rolled his eyes again, but his mind was working too quickly to make the extra expenditure of energy worthwhile. The memorized message was clearly not from the man facing him. In all likelihood, the bomb was not his handiwork, either; he'd merely been sent with instructions about where to place it and how to set it off. From the lucidity of the recitation's sentences, the true sender was the brains behind the attempt on his housemates' life. The implied layers of command were intriguing. Their lowest tier, however, was not. As far as engagement went, the only thing holding the intoxicated idiot above the level of ignorable was the knife in his hand and the brawn in his tree-trunk sized arms. Nearly forgetting even those, Sherlock looked up through his curling bangs and into the moron's dumb stare, plainly glowering. As if he didn't have anything else better to do than listen to the lumbering idiot prattle.

Through gritted teeth, he inquired scathingly, "And just how were you expected to deliver that message to me if you were originally planning to blow me up from afar?"

At the question, the hit man's eyes widened in amazement, and he mused wonderingly, "I…I guess I didn't think of that."

Oh, what was the world coming to? Despairing of the behemoth completely, Sherlock shook his head incredulously and grumbled, "Incompetent cretin."

The knife bit deeper into his neck in answer to his ill-considered remark. Evidently, two condescending words were all that was required to inflame a stupid man's sputtering temper. In seconds, Sherlock watched the blundering blockhead become engulfed by the furious ogre of before, and very suddenly the detective found himself faced with a raging lunatic once again. A very small, somewhat sheepish voice in the back of his head admitted that he hadn't quite thought his last comment through—not at all, in fact.

Feeling his heartbeat speed up to an even faster pace than it had achieved already, the tall brunette swallowed subtly, flinching when the motion made his throat press harder against the knife. Suddenly it looked as if the contract killer really would be collecting his reward money. His grip on the detective's dressing gown shifted jerkily up to encircle Sherlock's neck, and the knife drew back into a position that would make stabbing it into one gray-green eye a little too efficient for Sherlock to feel comfortable with. All things considered, the brunette found himself noting absently, it really was a day of firsts for him.

He'd never been trapped under a coffin, he'd never been so scatterbrained as he was proving to be that day—not even when he was on the more eclectic of his drug-induced "excursions"—he'd never experienced such pain as he was then, and he'd never kept his comments to himself.

Even more novel: he'd never wanted to kick himself before.

Conveniently, the job was well on its way to being done for him. Flushing a dark, mottled red of pure rage, the huge killer holding him roared, "Bastard_! _I'll_ kill_ you—!"

A second passed, and in it a dozen things were accomplished with distinct slowness. The knife drew back farther, covering the necessary inches for a true death blow to come about, and Sherlock tensed to struggle for his life one last, desperate time. Feeling his heart leap painfully in his chest, he wondered inwardly what sort of sensations the next second would bring. Perhaps he'd have one of those rare experiences where stress gave him inhuman strength and he could throw the man off of him at great cost to his bodily systems in order to survive. Perhaps John would come home some time later to find him bleeding out in the back alley.

He wasn't exactly charmed by either possibility.

For yet another bizarre moment, his perception of time retained its elastic quality. Everything seemed to stretch out, from the pounding of his pulse in his ears to the way that the knife glinted as the other man brought it down towards his left eye. Sherlock took a quick breath, trying to gauge the right way to survive; calculating the likelihood that sacrificing an arm would be enough to ward off the blade. Too slow. His thoughts whirred, but the knife was coming still. Perhaps he had finally found something that could outrace his almighty mind. Strange that he wasn't afraid. His death was coming fast—

But John Watson was faster.


	7. Chapter 6

**A/N: Hello. This is Knyle Borealis, the author. I'm finally figuring out how to make friends with this site, so please bear with me if any of the formatting/structural stuff doesn't make sense. I'll keep editing.**

This is my First Fanfiction Ever. I love Sherlock and John with a passion that started back when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was the only authority on the subject (not meaning to exclude Jeremy Brett, Basil Rathbone, or any of those other wonderful people who brought my hero to life), and ever since my seven-year-old self picked up a volume of "A Study in Scarlet," I have been in love with the world of Sherlock Holmes.

It's not Brit-picked AT ALL, so I apologize. I welcome any feedback that you feel like giving, nice or no, so please comment!

**Disclaimer—****_none of this is mine! _Okay, well, a wee bit of it may be mine… (Blood, Sweat, and Tears included) but all of the good stuff definitely belongs to Doyle, Moffat, and Gatiss. I thank them greatly.**

I hope you enjoy it.

**Note: I have noted many times that John Watson, pretty much the most famous side kick in the world (Step aside, Robin the Boy Wonder), is a pretty incredible BAMF. And a M.D. So I thought that I'd let him have some fun (I can almost hear him groaning in anticipation) for the next few chapters. Because I can obviously not show my love for characters without heaping some ungodly amount of abuse on them. ...I'm sorry, John...**

* * *

John wondered what it was like to have a mate that wasn't constantly getting him into fights. It was a strange thing to think, when he was half out of his mind with anger and in the midst of trying to save his best friend from being skewered in his bedclothes. It was even stranger for him to realize that he'd gotten completely used to his thoughts being unordinary. And to the fact that he often thought about the wrong sort of things at inopportune times. Like contemplating his tolerance for erratic thought while he was busy hitting a big, not so friendly giant over the head with a two-by-four.

Coming around the corner of the alley, he'd seen the enormous man pinning Sherlock to the wall and started running. The knife had appeared moments later, and in that half-second, John had been transported back to a year and a half before. Back when he was still in the field, still conditioned for warfare, and still in possession of two strong, fully-functioning shoulders. With the alert mindset of a soldier and nerves acclimatized to being under fire came an ineffable ability to move quickly and quietly. Padding down the alleyway towards his flatmate and his massive attacker, John spied the pile of wood on his left and snagged a board silently off of the top, gripping it securely in both hands.

The stranger—he realized that it was Max the deliveryman and expected to feel surprised about it later—was saying something to his friend, but he wasn't paying any attention to the words or sorry for not hearing it. All his attention was on the knife. Then came Sherlock's ill-timed insult, and the big brute snapped. As the thug bellowed in outrage, John darted around behind him, his eyes glued to the weapon at Sherlock's throat. Just as he'd hoped, Max didn't simply increase the pressure with his blade to end things then and there. Driven by rage, he brought the knife back, desiring to deliver a deathblow with all the force of his fury behind it.

The ex-army doctor didn't pause to think. As soon as he saw the blade glittering vulnerably beside the bigger man's head, he raised the board and snapped it out, slamming it into the inside of Max's raised fist. Bones snapped within the grip of thick fingers, the knife went flying off to the side to get lost in the disarray of bins, and John reversed directions with his club. It cracked in half when it collided with the left side of Max's head, but the break made no difference in its effectiveness. For a second John even feared that he'd actually killed the taller man with the blow. He was certain that he'd knocked him unconscious; letting go of Sherlock, the hard-headed colossus practically toppled to the ground, hitting the pavement with the detective right behind him.

Seeing his flatmate slide limply down the wall in his peripheral vision, John realized the harm that Max had done. Anger flooded him, sharpened into a thousand points by his mood, Sherlock's unkindness, Ness's injuries, Sarah's infidelity—taken all together, the lot of it had him seeing red. Meanwhile, Max had somehow recovered from the blow to his head. Dazedly pushing himself up onto his hands, he started to crawl unsteadily away. The doctor could hardly believe his eyes. He'd literally just broken a board over the man's head, and it had done barely anything. Several warning bells began to ring in his head at the thought. Something—something beyond size and intentions—was not normal about his opponent.

Reaching the building and grabbing a handy windowsill, the giant hauled himself to his feet and whirled around, bringing his fists up. _Uh-oh_. Of course—why hadn't he remembered his thoughts from their first meeting? Max was out of his mind. John could see how wired he was. It wasn't alcohol, though. It was easy to see that the act of drunkenness from before had been shed along with the false delivery uniform. Circling slowly opposite the other man, he wondered which drug that Max had _actually_ used before attacking the doctor's curly-haired flatmate.

Sherlock—the thought of him reminded John that he didn't have time to get into a row just then. His friend was hurt, possibly badly; he was still crumpled on the ground behind them and hadn't made a sound since the blond man's arrival.

As for Max, it didn't matter which pill had given him the buzz he was on. John knew how to handle him with or without a name; he'd let the ugly behemoth handle himself. As quickly as possible. With that goal held firmly in mind, the smaller man stopped circling and let Max come at him first, watching the inebriated colossus charge with cool calculation. Despite his anger, his mind was clear, his movements tight and controlled. True enough, he'd be crushed if his opponent managed to land even one hit. Unluckily for his wild-eyed adversary, though, the coordination required to accomplish such a feat was far beyond his bulky limbs until he sobered up.

Therefore unafraid, John waited patiently for Max to come, fully aware that the right time to strike at him would present itself eventually. Sure enough—Max left himself wide open. Just before the attacking man's arm came fully back to swing, John sidestepped him and ducked under his arm. He pivoted and reached out as he passed by, cracking Max in the back of the head with the half of the board that he still held. The drugged man was sent staggering once again, but considering how he had recovered before, the doctor doubted that the hit would do much.

As he'd expected, Max was so far gone that the pain he'd just incurred meant nothing. Before another moment had passed, the brute had caught himself and turned around, intent on having another go at the good doctor. John let the wood drop from his fingers to clatter on the ground, clenching his hands into fists instead. Max needed to be stopped, and the concern was no longer just for John and his flatmate's safety. There were limits that the body shouldn't be pushed to, but the larger man had obviously forgotten all about them. He was completely oblivious to the blood running down his neck, springing forth in red rivers from his nose and the various abrasions around his skull. If John didn't get him to stop soon, he'd kill himself by blood loss or disregard for his injuries.

Strangely enough, the doctor in him wasn't especially vocal about that fact. In all truth, the worry was barely even there, only loud enough to be registered in his mind; he was more occupied with cracking his fist across the taller man's jaw. He would probably feel bad about it later. Blessedly, his conscience showed no signs of interrupting as John felt a rush of fury lend strength to his attack.

Though up until then he had been completely calm and collected, as soon as he really started using his hands, the level of disconnectedness that had been sustaining his cool demeanor evaporated. His knuckles screamed, his shoulder burned, and it felt so good to vent his anger on a target that he had a legitimate excuse to beat into a pulp that he ducked Max's wildly swinging arms and hit him again in the nose.

And again, in the stomach.

And then once more in the face for good measure.

The high wasn't looking so mighty any more. Finally, John had knocked the big man on his heels, and before Max could recover again, the doctor stepped around beside him and hooked a foot behind his leg. The killer went down. On his knees, his neck was even with John's shoulder even when his back was hunched.

_Fought bigger_, the blond man noted blandly. Then, as soon as both the other man's legs hit the pavement, he brought his elbow down hard on the back of Max's thick, corded neck—hard enough to knock him out cold for the next few hours. Stopping there was a conciliatory gesture for his conscience—he could have killed Max with the blow. During his days in the service, he'd seen it done. He'd even done it himself, in one of those dark, dire situations that he tried not to think about.

He didn't do it there in the alley. With an inward sigh of frustration, John Watson shoved the anger burning inside of him aside and checked himself, stepping back from his opponent. He had enough nightmares from unholy acts to haunt him already. He didn't need to add any more to the list. The fight was over, anyway.

With a small groan, Max tilted forward and crumpled to the ground, unconscious, and the doctor ran a weary hand through his hair. Finding it damp with sweat, he sighed. In the freezing air of early spring, the moisture was already clammy and well on its way to chilling. Because he obviously wasn't cold enough. Fantastic. Shaking his head exasperatedly, John told himself to stay on subject and reached into his pocket to call for the police.

"Well, that was expedient."

And an ambulance. Good Lord, he'd almost forgotten about Sherlock.

Whirling around, John ran over and knelt by the side of his flatmate, scanning him over worriedly and dialing emergency services on his mobile. The call didn't ring. Looking bemusedly down at the screen in his hand, he just barely recognized the words NO SIGNAL before hanging up and dropping the phone back into the recesses of his jacket.

Sherlock would have thrown a fit if he got the police involved, anyway, and then he would be impossible to treat. It was a fleeting thought. John was nearly humming with worry. Sherlock was slumped against the brick beside Mrs. Hudson's back door, hunched up miserably, breathing in short, choppy gasps, and shivering in the cold.

The doctor didn't waste another moment, running his freed hands over his flatmate's cold flesh in search of major damage, assessing his condition as quickly and gently as he could. There didn't seem to be any life-threatening harm done, and he couldn't detect any broken bones in his upper or lower body. Some of his ribs were cracked, though. The definite knowledge of what was and wasn't wrong calmed John's racing heartbeat a little.

Even as his hands and practical senses went to work, John was watching Sherlock with sharp concern in his eyes. Though he had seen no end of carnage, he was still appalled by the sheer amount of injury that appeared to have been done to the taller man. The brunette was a mess. His clothes were ripped, dirtied, and bloody; his bandages were in disarray and discolored by the pavement and more blood; and his voice had sounded like he was speaking through a mightily swollen split lip. The doctor had seen soldiers step on IED's and come out in better shape.

"Are you conscious?" John asked his friend, unable to see for himself. Sherlock was so bent over that his face was hidden behind his drooping bangs.

Almost unnoticeably, a shoulder shrugged dismissively, and the detective murmured in a voice so low as to barely be audible, "Ahs of shis moment, yesh."

"How's your face?" Steeling himself for what he would see, John reached out and tucked hand under Sherlock's tucked chin, trying to bring his face into the light.

The brown head didn't budge an inch. Still managing to sound terse despite the fact that he was slurring every other syllable, the detective grumbled faintly, "Is' fine. Ah'm…fine."

No one was ever fine when they said that they were fine. It had taken John a while to spot the pattern, but after letting Ness pull the wool over his eyes already that day, he was having none of it. "You're fine? With blood all over you, enough bruises to blacken a building, and the wind knocked out of you?"

He was aware that he didn't sound the least bit sympathetic, but the world could only expect him to take so much in one day. Besides, if Sherlock got angry enough, he'd look up at him on his own. "Are you certain that 'fine' is the most appropriate word?"

"Yesh."

So much for goading him. The brunette's reluctance to show the doctor his countenance only made John more anxious still about what his flatmate was hiding. Giving another gentle tug on the side of his friend's face, he commanded, "Sherlock, look up."

Stubbornly resisting and keeping his face held down, the brunette mumbled, "Leave me 'lone, John. Ah'm _fine_."

"Well, you can be fine in the house," the doctor told him, already reaching into his pocket for the house key. "Can you move?" Once again, Sherlock gave a faint shrug. "All right, then. Lean on me."

Assuming that his shrug had meant that moving wouldn't kill him, John wrapped a careful arm around his friend's lean frame and helped him up to his feet. Sherlock was almost a dead weight, groaning softly when his flatmate's hold on him squeezed his aching ribs. He slumped on the smaller man's shoulder in uncharacteristic silence—thanks to his lack of air, probably—as John turned the key in the lock and let them into Mrs. Hudson's flat, ushering the taller man over to her kitchen table and sitting him down in one of the chairs. The battered detective could hardly sit up on his own, wincing and hissing with each movement he made to situate himself.

As soon as he was sure that the other man wasn't going to fall out of the chair, John bounded up the stairs, snatching up his medical kit from Sherlock's room. Then he paused. Perhaps he needed more than a doctor's range of tools for the job ahead of him. Somebody _had_ just attacked his flatmate in the alley, after all.

After a moment's hesitation, he ran up to his room as well, snatching his gun out of the bedside table, jamming it into the back of his waistband, and then hurtling back down to Mrs. Hudson's kitchen, using the bannisters to swing himself around the turns faster.

Setting his black bag down on the table at his friend's elbow, he went to the cabinets next, looking for linens that he'd need to tend to his friend and stopping up the sink so that he could fill it with warm water for them. As he hurried, he sent frequent glances in Sherlock's direction, growing more concerned by the minute.

He was too quiet. Where was the ever-ready quip, the rapid-fire analysis of who and how and why? Even without sufficient air, Sherlock was not the type to keep his mouth shut for long. John had seen him continue to talk and make his incessant comments even after he'd been strangled.

Strange how some of the most annoying things in the world could be missed through just one absence. He had already been missing havoc and mayhem—why not the running commentary that always seemed to accompany it as well? Really, though, the silence was getting to him. He couldn't help but look over at his friend every other moment, and it was making his search for supplies for tending to the other man all the harder. For heaven's sake, where did Mrs. Hudson keep her rags? He must have checked every drawer she had by then.

As John went from cabinet to cabinet, Sherlock's head was listing to the side, and he was all but laying on the table instead of just leaning on it. Finally grabbing the right door handle, the doctor tossed a handful of rags into the water in the sink, threw his supplies on the table, and started pulling the blue dressing gown off of his flatmate's still-heaving shoulders from behind. Sherlock made no move to acknowledge his presence.

His shoulders stopped moving entirely for a moment—an easy thing to detect, when their owner had been working so hard to draw air just seconds before. Pausing with the collar of his friend's ruined garment pulled only halfway down one bandaged arm, John felt a small knot of pure dread condense inside him.

"Sherlock?"

"_Mm_?"

Even his wordless mumbles sounded annoyed. John found himself rolling his eyes. At least Sherlock was awake to make noise. It was the wordless part that had the doctor worried. Moving with skillful urgency, John pulled his friend away from the table, reached around his shoulders, and finished pushing the dressing gown down his arms on both sides, carefully extricating each hand from the sleeves. It was an odd day when John was relieved to hear his patient growling at him every time he laid a finger on him, but considering their household, the doctor had long before come to accept that 'odd' was about as close to mundane as his days could get.

Nudging Sherlock gently on the neck, he reached for his stethoscope and inquired, "Can you raise your arms?"

With a grunt of affirmation, Sherlock did as he was bid, allowing John to listen to his breathing and ascertain if his cracked ribs were in danger of puncturing his lungs. With an expert ear, the doctor checked with the stethoscope from behind and then and moved around to listen to his friend's bound chest as well before he decided in the negative.

There would be heavy bruising and lying on his back would hurt a bit, but the detective would have no harder a time moving around than he'd had before with only his burns to slow him down. Certainly, there were no rooftop runs or street chases in his near future, but he could manage to pace around the flat well enough.

With that diagnosis out of the way, John tucked the stethoscope away and cautioned the sitting man, "I'm going to have a look under your dressings now, but then you're going to have to let me see your face." Before he could be met with another lie about the physical state of his friend's head, he pointed out, "I know that it's hurt; I can see the blood on your chin. Now, can you sit up a bit straighter? I need to get at the end of the bandages."

Unwinding all of Sherlock's bandages in five long, painstaking minutes, he tossed them aside and started to work, cleaning, disinfecting, and making note of any areas that deserved a second look once he was done. Just as it had before out in the alley, looking at all Sherlock's wounds actually helped him feel better.

As all the dirt and grime and blood were cleared away, it became apparent that the severity of the detective's condition wasn't nearly as bad as he'd feared. Getting ready to clean out some of the worst cuts on the other man's arms, John felt the tightness in his chest begin to release. Though more damage had been done than there was before Max's assault, it did not appear that his flatmate was due for a visit to the hospital. His mind _and_ his sanity were in the clear.

About fifteen minutes later, he replaced all of the dressings on Sherlock's arms and chest. The brunette's head remained the most important thing left untreated. John had noticed blood in his hair that needed seeing to, and he still hadn't seen his face, thanks to the detective's stubborn maintenance of its downward-facing position. Deciding to stave off that battle a little while longer, the doctor parted several chunks of stained dark curls and found the source of the bleeding on the back of Sherlock's skull.

It wasn't terrible. Head wounds always bled profusely, yet the amount of blood had been unremarkable. Based on that knowledge, he saw what he expected: only a small abrasion, stitches or glue unnecessary. It wouldn't need much tending; he saw to it immediately. The most worrisome thing about it was the proof it provided of Sherlock sustaining a blow to the head.

It was time to for the inevitable, then, John conceded with a sigh. His friend would unlikely feel like cooperating by then, but the doctor had to take a look at his face. He could examine the cuts on Sherlock's legs, but by rights he should have checked for signs of a concussion or brain injury ages ago. He couldn't put it off any longer in good conscience. And if there were any deep cuts, they needed to be dealt with sooner than later.

Hopefully, he'd be able to look his flatmate in the eye without punching him.

Fishing fresh linens out of the sink, he wrung them out and reached a small flashlight as well. Leaving Sherlock's side, he jerked another chair out from the table and sat across from his friend, staring resignedly at the top of his curly head. He already had a syringe full of water ready and waiting from earlier cleaning, so he pulled it closer for convenience and commanded his flatmate uncompromisingly, "Look up."

Throughout the whole time that he'd been working, Sherlock had remained quiet. Since he was still sitting up straight and leaning to help John reach where he needed, the doctor had known he was conscious, and he assumed that the detective wasn't talking out of some mulish desire to prolong their argument from earlier. Amazingly, though, his order wasn't ignored. Sherlock raised his head—grudgingly, certainly, but he did raise it—and looked John in the eye without a hint of a challenge in his expression.

He almost looked…blank. Far away. Distant. _Mind Palace_, John would have thought, but since Sherlock had a head injury, he didn't want to jump to conclusions. Nonplussed, the doctor nevertheless scanned the bloody mess spread that framed his friend's gray gaze and started working. It was automatic; he knew that he'd be sorry if he didn't take advantage of Sherlock's mysterious willingness to listen.

First things first. "Follow the light with your eyes."

Flicking on the flashlight, John checked the brunette's pupil reaction, quickly going through the tests for detecting concussions or neural complications. The way Sherlock just did as he asked was unnerving. It hardly seemed as if he realized that John was there at all.

He wasn't even glaring. Perhaps he really had gone to his Mind Palace. Figuring that the taller man drifted off into one of his long, wordless spells in which he would neither speak nor eat nor sleep for hours on end, John pursed his lips in irritation. If the numpty thought that he was going to cart him all the way up to their flat without any help…

Sick of the driver, he made himself focus on treating the transport. Sherlock's face was in complete disarray. From what John could tell, he didn't have a concussion, all his teeth were present, and no bones had been broken—the famous cheekbones were still in fine form. He just couldn't quite determine what needed looking after until he got rid of the top layer of dirt and other detritus that clung to his friend's skin.

There certainly was a lot of blood. With the wet cloths, John carefully scrubbed away the matter blocking his view. As he did so, he unearthed several shallow cuts on the left side of Sherlock's eyes that offset a particularly deep gash high up on his right temple, which was the source of the appalling red mask that had covered his remarkable features. His verbal incomprehensibleness was evidently thanks to the combination of a swollen lip and bitten tongue, neither of which would require anything more than ice and a few days to heal.

The gash needed stiches, though, so once he was done disinfecting, he gave Sherlock an injection to numb the area around it and looked at the other damage while he waited for the drug to take effect. The syringe he used to clean out all of the cuts, flushing them with water, and then it was short work to patch up the slighter among them.

By then Sherlock's forehead was numb enough for him to start sealing it. Taking a sterilized, bent needle, and clean silk thread, he closed up the wound with quick, neat stiches. Then all that was left was to cover it up and administer a shot of antibiotics. All told, the injuries were slight, compared to some of the damages that John had previously seen on his flatmate's visage.

All that remained were the scrapes on the detective's knees; John crouched and began to roll up his trouser legs with a faint feeling of a battle nearly won. Though he doubted that he'd receive an answer, he remarked, "You managed to get out of this one fairly well."

Sherlock stirred, his eyes flicking down to watch the doctor minister to his bleeding legs with a sort of clinical disinterest. "So did he."

Frowning, John looked up at him sharply, wondering what on Earth Sherlock was on about. Assuming that 'he' was Sherlock's attacker…well, he'd left Max out cold in the alley. There was no way that the man was in any better condition than his friend, drugs or no.

Seeing that the silver gaze that he'd meant to meet with his own was directed elsewhere, he turned and looked where Sherlock was staring. Mrs. Hudson's lace curtains hid most of the outside from view, but he could just make out the shapes of people moving out in the alley. They were standing directly over where Max lay unconscious.

John didn't hesitate. Leaping lightly onto his feet, he whipped his gun out of its hiding place and ran to the back door, tossing back over his shoulder as he went, "Sherlock, no matter what you hear, stay _put_."

Turning the handle quietly, he swung it open and peered around the door jamb, silent and ready. Two men were there, hauling Max's limp figure up between them. They were dressed in simple black clothing, muscled like prizefighters, and he could see the shapes of shoulder holsters beneath the one's jacket and his friend's knit jumper.

Not the Yard crowd, certainly, and probably not just concerned passerby. A black, unmarked car waited at the mouth of the alleyway, its back door open and waiting for them and their  
unconscious cargo. Altogether, there was far too much black for John's liking.

By the time he'd decided so, the men had already started walking towards the vehicle with their burden. John was fairly sure that he didn't want Max leaving that way. Stepping out of the doorway, he leveled his gun at the men's retreating backs. Keeping half an eye on the threshold he'd just abandoned in case the strangers had a volatile opinion of taking orders, he directed with quiet authority, "You two. Stop right there."


	8. Chapter 7

**A/N: Hello. This is Knyle Borealis, the author. I'm finally figuring out how to make friends with this site, so please bear with me if any of the formatting/structural stuff doesn't make sense. I'll keep editing.**

This is my First Fanfiction Ever. I love Sherlock and John with a passion that started back when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was the only authority on the subject (not meaning to exclude Jeremy Brett, Basil Rathbone, or any of those other wonderful people who brought my hero to life), and ever since my seven-year-old self picked up a volume of "A Study in Scarlet," I have been in love with the world of Sherlock Holmes.

It's not Brit-picked AT ALL, so I apologize. I welcome any feedback that you feel like giving, nice or no, so please comment!

**Disclaimer—****_none of this is mine! _Okay, well, a wee bit of it may be mine… (Blood, Sweat, and Tears included) but all of the good stuff definitely belongs to Doyle, Moffat, and Gatiss. I thank them greatly.**

I hope you enjoy it.

**Note: I have noted many times that John Watson, pretty much the most famous side kick in the world (Step aside, Robin the Boy Wonder), is a pretty incredible BAMF. And a M.D. So I thought that I'd let him have some fun (I can almost hear him groaning in anticipation) for the next few chapters. Because I can obviously not show my love for characters without heaping some ungodly amount of abuse on them. I'm sorry John...**

**Note 2: Ok, so the last bit was Doctor John Watson, M.D. All and sundry, I would like you to meet Captain John Watson, formerly of the 5th Northumberland Fusiliers, and probably the only man in London who can live a day in the dangerous, mysterious, unadulturated life of Sherlock Holmes and manage not to crack up. He's pretty frickin' awesome (although he does tend to swear a bit). I hope that I portrayed him correctly...**

* * *

In an instant Max was dropped to the ground, and the two goons whirled about, drawing their guns as they did. John would have dropped them then and there, but even as he'd spoken to them, the passenger side door of the car was flung open. A hail of bullets covered the two men in the alley with him as they turned around. John was forced to throw himself into the entryway of 221 to avoid getting shot.

"John?"

He gritted his teeth in aggravation. Wasn't anybody going to pay attention to what he told them? "Not _now_, Sherlock. Get back into the kitchen, and _Stay_. _Down_."

For once, the man listened; John heard him move away and saw the retreating motion of the blue robe out of the corner of his eye. Thinking darkly to himself about how bloody uncooperative the people in his life were, he heard the gunfire—his mind immediately took what he heard and concluded that the bullets were likely from a single-action, semi-automatic pistol—cut off. Sounds of one of the gunmen dragging something heavy towards the auto reached John's ears, prompting him to frown fiercely.

Chancing a peek around the corner, he was rewarded with a glimpse of one man struggling valiantly to hold Max's weight on one shoulder—he had yet to holster his gun—long enough to get him to the car before the remaining thug took a shot at John's blond head. Slamming back into cover, the doctor huffed out a sigh. He was pinned where he was; it was highly unlikely that he could get a shot off without getting hit himself.

Some neighbor was undoubtedly calling the police, but if his time with Sherlock had taught him anything, it was that they always arrived too late anyway. His attackers were going to get away. With his luck, they'd escape without a scratch, too, probably after they made sure that he was dead. Or at least unable to give pursuit. Getting shot would take care of that nicely; he'd taken a bullet before, so he would know.

As if to emphasize the thought, another round of lead chipped away at the edge of the corner that sheltered him; the gunman in the car trying to keep him hunkered down while his compatriots got to the vehicle. John flinched as broken shards of brick stung against his cheek. He could take refuge in the house, the practical part of him suggested, bringing up the choice of hiding more as an extension of the strategizing that he was doing than of an actual inclination to avoid conflict.

At the thought, even though it was only fleeting and half-hearted, something inside John that had been beaten and trampled and poked at far too much that day already growled in defiance. Gripping his gun tighter, he decided that he'd rather chance a bullet than let them win the standoff without resistance on his part. Hopefully Mrs. Hudson wouldn't be too put out with him if some of her property got a bit more…_weathered_ in the process.

The gunmen were still moving; closing his eyes, he zeroed in on the sounds of their footsteps and marked out their location in his head. It would be easiest to hit the one farthest on the left, though he was farther away. The angle would allow John to stay partly behind the wall while he took the shot. With that plan in mind, the doctor gave himself one second to find his center before he made the attempt.

As was his unusual custom, he could feel a sort of mad giddiness welling up inside him with the heightened stress; he'd always had a rather unorthodox reaction to danger. His body was taught as a bowstring, but just as ready and capable of snapping into motion as any rubber band. Mindful of his situation, though, he suppressed the grin threatening on his lips and focused. He allowed himself time for one controlled, steadying breath. Then, just like the elastic that he'd likened himself to, he snapped explosively into movement.

Whipping around, he locked his eyes on his target and fired with the utmost precision. A clatter reached his ears, but his eyes were mostly consumed by the blur of motion in the other gunman's direction. To his mild surprise, his peripheral vision told him that he'd actually managed to knock his target's weapon out of his hand, like he'd meant to. A grim little smile of satisfaction was already settling on his face before he ducked under cover again to avoid the rain of bullets that came in response.

His tight smile widened as the air was filled with angry expletives. He could hear the fear behind the bluster, and the pain—his bullet had created enough shrapnel from the cheap, factory-made gun to ruin his target's hand. The gunmen would no doubt be much more inclined to thank him for his tampering by making sure that he was dead before they left, but he wasn't especially bothered.

The panicked swearing was the first form of talk that he'd heard between his opponents; he took it as a sign of incompetence rather than professionalism. They weren't even organized enough to handle one unexpected citizen with a Sig Sauer. From what he'd seen thus far, their skills in combat situations were somewhat lackluster—and it wasn't just their faulty communication. They had big guns, sure, but just looking at the way they held—and were so easily relieved of—the weapons told him that they weren't quite up to using them effectively.

Granted, he wasn't exactly a local without ingrained resources. Already, he could feel his training taking over, the mentality of being an operative under fire slipping over his civilian persona like a familiar glove. John identified the hum of his pulse thrumming in his body, knew that adrenaline was pushing him into the peak physical state that his body was capable of. The heightened senses and reactivity would work in his favor, up until the time that he crashed. And he was known for his magnificent adrenaline crashes.

_Not the time to think about that_, he told himself crisply.

The gunman that he'd disarmed was still carrying Max, and he'd gotten them almost to the car. Knowing that he was likely to get killed if he stayed where he was much longer, anyway, John took a breath and spun around again, stepping farther out beyond the edge of the wall than before and squeezing the trigger three quick times. The lookout returned fire at once, but John was already safe behind his shelter.

His volley had sent the man with Max sprawling in a panic, as he'd meant it to. He hadn't shot the fallen goon, though. Oh no. He'd put holes in both of the car's left side wheels and a very specific place in the engine.

His aim was true. Since the thugs hadn't had the car idling while they waited, they soon discovered that, thanks to John's bullet, there was no way for them to start it up. The doctor refused to allow himself even a small flicker of pride at the achievement. It had would have been a doubtful shot for him to make even back when he was an acting soldier, but he acknowledged that a year of inaction hadn't completely dulled his skill _without_ inner comment. In his opinion, nothing was spectacular if it happened simply because it needed to be done.

He could already hear the goons' frantic exclamations as they realized that they'd lost their chance for a clean getaway. He thought he heard a phone being dialed, but seconds later the discontented muttering rose up into a full-on wail. Evidently, they'd had the same bad luck as he had earlier, and the call hadn't gone through.

With the car inoperable, the gunmen were stranded. The only thing that they could do was retreat on foot, but with Max to bring along, it would be slow going. And John was finally able to hear the wail of a police siren echoing off of the buildings. The cavalry, coming just in time to claim the glory once again.

_If_ it got there in time.

John perked up as he heard car doors slam, but before he thought about checking around the corner, a few bullets intervened to discourage him. Opting to press back against the brick instead, he listened as a gruff voice barked orders, too low and too far for his ringing ears to discern the words.

Scuffling and grunting of at least two people sounded near where Max and his handler had fallen, and then the sound of two pairs of jogging, much-burdened footsteps moved away from the spot. The gruff voice snarled again, and they left the alley with it.

John counted three pairs of feet in that direction, accounting for the passenger, one gunman, and possibly the driver. The last man was only a moment behind them in tearing off, making sure that John stayed down while the others made tracks with another quick staccato burst of gunfire.

As soon as they turned the corner, John was out and running. They'd gone to the left, so he crossed to that side. Keeping close to the wall for concealment, he kept his eyes on the shining windshield of the car as he approached the sidewalk at the mouth of the alley, watching the reflection of the men leave him behind in the glass.

They made it to the next block just as he rounded the side of the buildings. A sinking feeling took hold in his stomach as he watched them turn the corner. Determined to catch up to them, John sprinted, holding the gun close to his body to shield it from any potential witnesses. The corner that they gunmen had turned was only a few steps away when he heard the sound of spinning tires.

_Damn_. Knowing of only one group of people in the vicinity that would have reason to peel out, John swept the area urgently with his gaze as he finally made the turn. A black car almost identical to the one parked across the Baker Street alley was sending up smoke behind it as it barreled off in the other direction, drawing stares and shouted insults. John trotted to a halt at the sight. The men were gone. He'd let them get away. Without a scratch.

John's hands fisted at his sides. _Fucking Hell._ He'd cocked up again—just another perfect addition to his day. Frowning fiercely, John watched the fleeing vehicle screech around another corner. There weren't any license plates to identify, but he tried to memorize the make and model as best he could before it disappeared for good.

Unaware of the passersby who moved around him while he concentrated, he nevertheless kept the gun hidden against his leg out of habit, knowing what to do with the weapon without really even having to think about it. If only he'd had the instincts to use it more to his advantage.

Turning on his heel, the doctor made his way back to Baker Street, forgoing the front door in favor of another look at the alley. He was beginning to become bloody furious with himself. He should have winged the men, he criticized himself, kept them there for the police to take into custody.

The police.

John slapped a hand to his forehead at the thought, suddenly feeling like the weight of the gun in his hand had tripled. Though he had managed to spend over a year in official company without breaking his habit of carrying the weapon, Lestrade and his police team were unaware of him owning it.

Necessarily so, as John had used the gun to kill a serial killer and save Sherlock on the very first night that he'd met them all. Add to that the fact that his owning a military-grade handgun was well and completely illegal, and his being discovered with the weapon was just not a good idea. He and Sherlock had preferred to keep their police friends in the dark rather than risk John being sent to prison for 5-10 years on a gun possession charge.

To his relieved surprise, there were no flashing lights at the mouth of the alley when it came into sight. As John got closer, he could see that everything was just as he'd left it, from the pockmarked brick to the gleaming windshield of the abandoned getaway car. Coming ever closer to the back of Baker Street, his angle of view widened, and he could even see the disrupted pile of scrap wood that he'd passed on his way after the fleeing criminals.

Oh. The wood. That prompted a thought, a memory of something that he'd seen in the corner of his eyes as he rushed past...but then a flash of movement caught his eye, and he jerked the gun up instinctively, covering the car.

A pair of feet was waggling around at the rear door of the vehicle, the one on the alley side that had been left open in readiness for receiving Max and his aborted carriers. The appendages were clad in a pair of impeccable black dress shoes: ones John knew all too well. Though he'd somewhat expected them—well, he'd truly been watching for carpet slippers. Heaving a disbelieving sigh, he glanced around surreptitiously for onlookers before tucking the gun away. The area was eerily deserted.

Wondering how a city like London had managed to produce an empty street, John walked up behind the person rummaging around in the backseat without a word, circumventing the open passenger door and pausing only when he was directly beside the car. Purposefully far enough away from the door to keep the searcher safely out of his reach.

"Sherlock, what are you doing?" John kept his voice bland, striving for patience. He wasn't at all on edge, no, no; he was the picture of disinterested patience: amicable, conversational, mildly interested. Nonviolent.

His flatmate's voice was back to its full, condescending strength, if a bit muffled. "What does it look like I'm doing? Don't be thick, John."

By sheer force of will, the blond man let that one pass. Shoving his hands in his pockets, he found his lack of mittens, remembered who he'd lent them to, and by then it was easy for his mind to make the simple leap to a certain other pair of hand coverings that he'd seen lately. Red ones. John gritted his teeth at the recollection, his control assailed by yet another of his anger's attempts to break free. The prospect of letting it loose was tempting, so tempting…but John was a soldier; he held on.

With only the slightest edge in his voice to give away his threatening temper, he inquired mildly, "And how, exactly, are you managing that? Not five minutes ago you were barely sitting up on your own and looking catatonic."

Sherlock paused, and John could see his curly head rise slightly in the window created by the driver and passenger seats as he considered the doctor's observation. Or perhaps he was finally picking up on the grim aggravation hiding beneath John's tone. "I was thinking. Sorted now."

He sounded like he did when he was dismissing the validity of a police report. Completely unengaged. Definitely not aware of his flatmate's displeasure. John raised an eyebrow, inwardly amazed at his own self-control. "And you were thinking right through the whole time in the kitchen? It never occurred to you to tell me that you weren't going into shock or becoming otherwise insensible or, oh, I don't know, _dying_?"

"You know very well that I don't converse on the obvious."

Sherlock sounded distinctly annoyed, something that John found perversely funny, seeing as he was the one who wanted to strangle something and yet had thus far been the most civil. Ducking his head again, the battered detective bent down so that he could see under the bottoms of the front seats, grunting and cursing as his unwise action led to him slipping and becoming stuck with his torso painfully twisted around and his skull planted on the hard rubber mat in the well.

"Ouch! John!"

Acting like he hadn't heard Sherlock's anxious cry for assistance, John looked out over the roof of the car and ignored the thrashing of gangly limbs in his peripheral vision. Leaning casually against the vertical bar between the front and back doors, he surveyed the surrounding buildings and realized that the police sirens that he'd heard before were still far away—almost gone, in fact.

Why hadn't they arrived? Hadn't any of the neighbors called the police? He'd tried, himself, but had been unable to get through. The only reason that he hadn't redialed was that he assumed others' concern would bring the right personnel to him anyway.

It was so strange that in a city as modern as London, not a single onlooker had bothered to use their mobiles at the sound of gunfire. John frowned as he considered the unlikelihood. Now that he thought about it, the gunmen hadn't had much luck with their phones, either…

Pulling out his mobile, he looked in consternation at the NO SIGNAL message. Perhaps it wasn't that no one had tried to report the shooting; perhaps, like him, the attempt had been made impossible. Several explanations ran quickly through his mind, but as a pragmatic man, he knew instantly the fastest way to get the truth.

Turning to the most likely culprit for the block's radio silence, John fixed his control in place and pressed him, "Sherlock, why aren't the police here?"

The detective stopped struggling for a moment, panting heavily, his body stiffened in clear lines of distress. For a moment there was silence—him bringing his mind back to the trifling problems of the present, no doubt—and then he rasped breathlessly, "Signal jammer. Stole it from Anderson after last week's Spy Ring incident. Appears to be working better than I expected."

Shaking his head, John reached down and disentangled the taller man, helping Sherlock to sit up on the edge of the seat. "No kidding. When a firefight breaks out in a highly populated city and no one from law enforcement shows up about it, I usually assume that I'm in a war zone."

"There do seem to be similarities," Sherlock conceded. He grimaced in pain and distaste, presumably at something that the blond man had just said, and stood up on his own, albeit gingerly.

John blinked. His flatmate was fully dressed. In John's clothes. The brunette had forgone his usual suit ensemble in favor of real, still-formal trousers and one of John's smarter long-sleeved shirts (From John's service days, made out of a light, stretchable material, easier to handle with clumsy fingers than buttons and softer on injuries).

"You couldn't have done without the gunfire, I suppose?" Sherlock asked in irritation, interrupting John's staring.

He was absentmindedly tugging on the sleeves to make them lay right as he surveyed the scene of the alley: a futile attempt, as John's smaller, stockier size made his clothing a little too short in the arms and a little too wide in the shoulders for someone of the brunette's stature, though remarkably the shirt otherwise seemed to fit just fine.

Turning his piercing gaze on the shorter man in front of him, the detective complained in vexation, "Even though the jammer is working effectively, with your antics the police are bound to turn up eventually and start being insufferable."

John very studiously kept the greater part of his mind focused on the miracle of Sherlock's being properly attired to be outdoors. Considering his still-bandaged, still-sore fingers, John was impressed that he'd managed it in spite of himself.

But then, who was he kidding? He could be admiring and angry all at once; his time with Sherlock had honed that skill into perfection. At least he'd never been able to stay mad at the oblivious sociopath for long.

Eying his friend's unauthorized borrowing with a creeping feeling of weary resignation, he muttered, "Well, at least then you'd have company."

Sherlock gave him a dirty look and bent to start searching in the front of the car. Biting the inside of his cheek in an effort to swallow the urge he felt to boot the man headlong into the vehicle, John turned away, searching the area for a distraction. His eyes alighted on the strewn wood once again, and recalling his earlier observation, he walked over to see if there was a reason why he'd thought something was amiss.

At first nothing seemed to jump out at him; the wood had been knocked about, likely in Sherlock's fight with Max. But then, only a few boards had been thrown into disarray, carving out a neat little indent into the side of the pile that was under the window of Mrs. Hudson's storage room window. John had never known debris to scatter so neatly when it was displaced in a true fight of any kind.

Seeing that a number of flatter boards had slid down at the back of the pile, he reached down and slid them aside. Several smaller pieces of wood lay beneath, but beside those, nearly hidden amongst the other rubble, something glinted. A metal container of some sort, surrounded on all sides by irregularly-shaped objects. They were most definitely not made of wood.

His curiosity caught, John crouched in front of the odd array, scanning over the pieces and parts in front of him with growing alarm. Without really thinking about it, he instantly stiffened up, his shoulders and back straightening into a soldier's wary posture. With careful hands, he cleared away all of the clutter in front of him that was wood, leaving the little bits of wiring and machinery alone on the pavement.

He made sure to look at it from all angles before allowing himself to return to his original conclusion. Yes, it was exactly what he'd been afraid it was. _I leave him alone for twenty minutes…_ he thought, and that was about as far as his startled emotions progressed. The sight was a shock, but at the same time, he found that he really couldn't drum up the proper amount of surprise for such a discovery. Frowning, he shook his head and ran a hand through his hair, sighing wearily. He had been living with Sherlock for over a year, after all.

He'd already had his love life eviscerated, prevented his flatmate from becoming a homicide victim, and engaged in a gunfight with kidnappers…so far that day. What was another encounter with something stressful and potentially life-threatening?

John wondered when he'd become so optimistic about living with a madman. To his bafflement, he felt himself smiling faintly and shaking his head as he called to his preoccupied flatmate, "Sherlock, why are there parts of a bomb in the wood pile?"

"Because I disabled the one that _'Max'_ had placed there," his friend answered, sneering and saying the giant man's name with utter contempt.

"Oh. Right, yeah." Disabled. Good. It couldn't blow them up without at least a few minutes' worth of tampering. With that worry gone, his mind moved on to other things. Namely, questions.

Why had the man who'd just gotten kidnapped tried to plant a bomb at Baker Street?

_Did Sherlock know about the bomb before John left the house?_

Why had he attacked Sherlock with a knife in the back alley?

_Why had Sherlock taken him on alone?_

Why had Max been collected by a group of armed thugs?

_Had Sherlock been lured out to the alley by the bomb for a reason, or did he recognize the trap and walk into it anyway?_

When had he placed the explosives?

_Sherlock had to know that the bomb was there before John went to the park; he was Sherlock, for crying out loud._

Who was trying to kill his flatmate?

_Why hadn't Sherlock gone to John for help?_

A bit dizzy from a sudden rush of anger, sadness, confusion, and wariness, John couldn't help but let a small flash of potent relief slip in amongst the bedlam. He didn't have to deal with a bomb, after all. He could let go of the tension inside him.

Abruptly, exhaustion crashed down upon him, compounding by his relaxing muscles and the chemical changes that a body underwent after running on adrenaline. Standing up straight with some difficulty, John moved to the wall beside the woodpile and leaned heavily against it, focusing on regulating his breathing.

Closing his eyes with a rueful smile, he mentioned to his still-listening friend, "Of course you know that I've been calling him Max in my head."

"Well, it wasn't as if you were going to come up with anything creative once you'd read the name tag," Sherlock pointed out snidely. "I saw the delivery uniform while I was managing the bomb. Obviously not his—he stole it off of a forty-eight year old smoker and father of three in Brighton. But the name works for identification convenience."

Cutting off midstream, he looked away from his inspection of the driver's seatbelt buckle and twisted back to peer out the rear window at his flatmate. With a note of something suspiciously like plaintive worry in his voice, he asked, "John, are you all right?"

He almost made it sound like a complaint. John's lips quirked upwards again. His appreciation for Sherlock had a habit of rising right along with his irritation. Of course the brunette was complaining. Shame on him for forcing Sherlock to be concerned with something other than the analysis of dust and skin oils left by the driver. Without opening his eyes, John nodded to his infuriating, awe-inspiring friend, laying his head back against the brick.

"Yeah, I'm good," he assured the other man, somewhat breathlessly. "It's just an adrenaline crash."

He really needed to figure out a better way to cope with them, John admonished himself. Still smiling wryly as he waited for his body to finish its temper tantrum, he pried his eyelids apart and watched patiently as Sherlock went back to searching the car for clues. Absently, his mind drifted off to the days when everyone he knew was well aware of what happened to him after a good firefight.

His reactions had become common knowledge in the army; it had even gotten to the point that his unit had considerately—and unofficially—built in a few minutes after just after they returned from every op just so a (frustrated, resigned) Captain John Watson could let his body get itself together for the debriefing. Some of his army mates had taken to saying that he fell every bit as far below them in physical ability during a come-down as he was high above them when his nerves were working in his favor.

He'd always accused them of exaggerating the contrast. His lows were pretty bloody spectacular, sure, but he didn't consider his normal self as anything special. A soldier who did his duty was hardly unordinary; John had never tried to do more than what he knew he should as a member of Her Majesty's military and a taker of the Hippocratic Oath.

Of course, things had been much simpler when he had those two guidelines to go by. As a discharged veteran with only a Medical Degree and an illegal handgun to remind himself of the man that he'd built himself into, John found that some lines had begun to blur in his mind.

For instance, that blade's edge between waiting for something exciting to happen and hoping that the sort of tragedy required to gain Sherlock's attention would never befall anyone—it had only gotten sharper. His academic knowledge of societal laws and healing nature wished for boredom; the inner child that Sherlock brought out and his inescapable fondness for adrenaline rushes couldn't wait for the silence to be broken.

John knew, without a doubt, that he would always elect the former identity when forced to pick one over the other. It was just that being around Sherlock made satisfying both of them possible without him having to choose.

He was grateful for the chance to have a well-rounded (as far as his needs were concerned) existence, but the ease with which he fell into the persona of a man who could face strife and bloodshed without flinching or feeling the need to step away had always made him a bit uncomfortable. It was why he'd done so well as a soldier as well as a doctor, but as most people might surmise, finding a balance between the two spheres of his personality could be a tricky business.

Though to be frank, John was hardly bemoaning his lifelong struggle. The skill that he'd cultivated for maintaining that necessary equilibrium was part of the reason why he was so good at dealing with Sherlock.

"Idiots!"

Sparked from his doldrums at the sound of Sherlock's triumphant insult, the doctor looked up. His flatmate was on the far side of the car, which he'd evidently moved to in order to search the driver's side better. Instead of bending over, though, he was ramrod straight, smiling widely as he held a small white bit of something aloft above the car roof.

Pushing away from the wall, John made a wobbly circuit around the back of the vehicle and came to his side. As he approached, it became clear that it was a piece of paper held between Sherlock's fingertips. There was a bit of writing on it, small enough that the blond man had to lean in beside his friend's shoulder in order to get a decent view of it.

"What is it?" he asked as he peered at it, recognizing that Sherlock was about to burst for want of sharing his observations.

The taller man brought it closer to John's face obligingly. "Scrap of a paper napkin, torn off a larger square. Had a drink in a glass bottle set on it before being torn, then was used to clean chip sauce off of someone's black cotton shirt. Smells of varnish, smoke, and stale beer: has been on a bar recently. This bar."

He pointed to the small writing on the edge of the shred, which undeniably was the name and information for a pub, _Dawson's_. The conclusion seemed irrefutable enough. And John could see Sherlock's natural response to it coming like a sort of inescapable runaway train. Already thinking of a proper response—something along the lines of _'there is no way in Hell that I am letting you drag us off on a bloody chase after a group of armed kidnappers and, apparently, a bomber in your condition' _—John opened his mouth to argue.

As he did, though, he was still looking at the napkin, finishing reading the small words. _Terrible idea to advertise in such a hard-to-read way when your customers are pretty much expected to be inebriated_, he noted in a quiet mental aside. Then he really paid attention to what he was seeing, and his mouth went shut with a snap.

Both previous trains of thought were obliterated by the time he'd reached the last letter of the missive. By surprise. Because, really, he had already heard of the place where the napkin was from that day, and there was no such thing as a coincidence in the world of Sherlock Holmes.

The address was for a small little town that John had never heard of. That wasn't what was bothering him. What got his attention was that the town was on the edge of the Forest of Dean.

In other words, West Gloucestershire.

Next to him, Sherlock read the realization in the doctor's posture and nodded smugly to himself, certain that his desired outing would be taking place shortly. It was all but assured that he'd get his way, thanks to John's pre-initiated interest in their destination. The gunmen couldn't have been more helpful to him if they'd all walked into Baker Street and surrendered to arrest without a fight.

Sherlock wanted to clap with glee over the fact that for once the criminal element had made a dimwitted mistake that actually led him towards a more intellectually engaging case rather than a dull one. He waited another moment before speaking, just to make sure that his friend had fully comprehended the information in front of him. Then he turned and caught John's bemused eye, his own gaze filled with self-satisfied glee, and made sure that his expression was as irksomely ingenuous as humanly possible.

"John, just how keen are you on finding out where that woman got her bruises?"


	9. Chapter 8

**A/N: Hello. This is Knyle Borealis, the author. I'm finally figuring out how to make friends with this site, so please bear with me if any of the formatting/structural stuff doesn't make sense. I'll keep editing.**

This is my First Fanfiction Ever. I love Sherlock and John with a passion that started back when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was the only authority on the subject (not meaning to exclude Jeremy Brett, Basil Rathbone, or any of those other wonderful people who brought my hero to life), and ever since my seven-year-old self picked up a volume of "A Study in Scarlet," I have been in love with the world of Sherlock Holmes.

It's not Brit-picked AT ALL, so I apologize. I welcome any feedback that you feel like giving, nice or no, so please comment!

**Disclaimer—****_none of this is mine! _Okay, well, a wee bit of it may be mine… (Blood, Sweat, and Tears included) but all of the good stuff definitely belongs to Doyle, Moffat, and Gatiss. I thank them greatly.**

I hope you enjoy it.

**Note: This chapter has been the fastest one for me to write so far. I don't know how that happened, but if there are any mistakes because of it, I'm sorry, and please let me know. Now, about the actual plot-I love Lestrade. He's a representation of "normal" in Sherlock's world that still doesn't quite fit the boring, uninteresting label that Sherlock has applied to that part of the universe. He reminds me of asort of surrogate-guardian type for Sherlock, and his team is just so laughable sometimes that I had to put them in here (if only to make fun of Anderson). **

**Note 2: I started writing the car as American-made! Sorry! I fixed it!**

* * *

Detective Inspector Gregory Lestrade was not happy with his Consulting Detective. The mouth of the Baker Street alleyway was alive with police personnel, forensics and ballistics running amok as they sought to work out exactly what had happened there approximately two hours earlier.

The reports all said approximate, because while over a dozen people from the nearby area had called in with a report of shooting in the alley, they had all done so over an hour after the event and had therefore been unable to quite agree on a time frame. Somehow, none of them could make calls from their mobiles before then, and precious few people kept land lines any longer.

Even if it hadn't happened at Baker Street, Lestrade would have gone looking for Sherlock the second that he heard about it. Since it was at the lanky detective's home, though, he'd rushed over to 221 as fast as he could, pulling up to the scene to see that half of his team was already there, somehow ignoring that they were in the homicide department and coordinating the assessment of what had gone on.

"Please tell me that you have something," he grumbled to his coworker as he ducked under the police cordon.

His right hand, Sergeant Sally Donovan, had her fists on her hips as he walked over, staring hard at the abandoned, unmarked car sitting in front of her and at the milling people going back and forth in the street as they tried to piece together the course of events that had brought the vehicle there. And had also left so many bullet casings lying around.

To answer his plea, she scowled and glanced over, reporting dourly, "I have one unregistered vehicle with both right side tires shot flat, a bullet through the right side of the hood. Signs of multiple people in the alley, a shootout, and a fistfight as well. I know that out of over a hundred bullets, all but one appear to have four come from semi-automatic, single action pistols, and that there are three more waiting to be dug out of that car and identified." Gritting her teeth, she ground out in frustration, "I do _not_ have any of the participants, any victims, or any witnesses. At all."

Lestrade ran a hand over his eyes, nodding in acknowledgement as he swept his gaze around the cordon. "Where're Sherlock and John?"

Sally's grimace deepened. "Freak's not here. I sent someone in to talk with his landlady. She just got in a couple of minutes ago."

As she spoke, a young forensic trotted up, holding a small slip of paper in his hand and wearing a slightly amused, very uncomfortable expression. Coming up to the Sergeant, he held out his offering gingerly, as if he was expecting her to bite him when she tried to take it. "The landlady doesn't know where they are, Ma'am. She and I found this note on her kitchen table while I was…helping her carry some groceries into her flat. It's from Mr. Holmes and Dr. Watson."

"So _that's_ what took you so long." Nearly proving that the man's hesitance was well founded, Sally snatched the paper out of his flinching hands, scanning it over quickly. An expression of growing outrage grew on her features, and Lestrade waited in impatience while she satisfied herself of its contents. Realizing that she might need a hint about who needed to see the evidence, he cleared his throat suggestively.

"Donovan, if you aren't too terribly fond of that…"

Looking up sharply, she caught on to what she was doing and handed the note over with a sheepish air. Her face was still twisted with dislike and indignation, though, so Lestrade was pretty much expecting to be insulted as he looked down to read. On the page, torn neatly from an ordinary "_Just a Note_" pad that so many households kept lying around, Sherlock and John had both scribbled hasty explanations to their landlady, along with a few other, more pointed remarks that were meant for a different audience entirely.

Reading Sherlock's dark, precise lettering, Lestrade almost laughed out loud before he remembered that he was supposed to feel affronted. Honestly, the man knew no bounds. It was easy to see from John's easy, messy scrawl that the man had been ever-mindful of his flatmate's charm when he said his piece. Even on paper, the two of them were opposites, but their relationship seemed to work splendidly nonetheless.

Sherlock's message to his landlady:

_Gone to the country with John. Don't know when we'll be back. Don't let Anderson have any scones._

John followed it up with a much more helpful, apologetic explanation.

_Don't worry, we won't be long. And I did all the packing, so we've got everything we need this time. I'll call as soon as I know what part of the country I'm actually going to be staying in. Sorry about the short notice._

_Oh—I'm sorry, but some of your rags were ruined earlier. Sherlock will replace them when he gets back._

Lestrade actually gave in and chuckled when he read that one. John Watson did seem like an unassuming sort of bloke, but when it came to his flatmate, he was made of steel. Lestrade had seen how adept he was at keeping his force-of-nature friend—and Christ, he and Sherlock really _were_ friends, somehow—in line for the benefit of those around them. There was no doubt in his mind that Mrs. Hudson's kitchen would be receiving the most expensive linens that London had to offer before the week was out.

Going on, he lost a bit of his brevity when Sherlock intervened again, prompting him to sigh and roll his eyes at the younger man's complete lack of tact. And respect. And every other aspect of average social behavior.

_Lestrade, that mess outside is completely beyond you without me, and Mrs. Hudson doesn't want the police in her back alley causing problems and making stupid assumptions, so stop pestering. It's only polluting my house with stupid. _

_Anderson, since you're the main culprit behind that toxicity, stop being and idiot and do your job competently for once. And Put. That. Scone. Back._

At the very bottom, in an even more illegible mess than his normal, stereotypical doctor's hand, John had tried to soften the blow.

_Sorry Lestrade. I didn't catch him in time. But seriously, Anderson, leave Mrs. Hudson's baking alone._

He'd probably written it just before he'd run out the door after Sherlock. Feeling a little half-smile tugging at his lips, Lestrade looked up into Sally's glare and bit back a laugh, turning and searching the area for a particular dark head. Chagrin settled into his chest when he saw the man coming around the building from the front of Baker Street, chatting with a colleague and trying to hide something palm-sized and pastry-looking down at his side.

Shaking his head, the DI strode over, feeling a bit of thunder slip into his expression. Anderson saw him coming and got an edgy, trapped look in his eye. Lestrade didn't even have to look down at the forensic scientist's hand for confirmation of his edible contraband, after that. Narrowing his eyes at his often-embarrassing associate, the Detective Inspector pointed back the way Anderson came.

"Christ, Anderson, she's an old woman. Go put the scone back and apologize."

"B-but she offered," Anderson stammered.

"Put it _back_." Lestrade glared until the man was headed hurriedly to do so until turning to the man that Anderson had been conversing with, a tall, surprisingly fit-looking fellow with glasses that seemed to hide his eyes. His badge identified him as a forensics specialist, and scanning it quickly for his name, Lestrade commanded, "Barkley. Show me what happened here."

With an odd sort of non-smile, the man nodded and led the Detective Inspector back towards the alleyway, walking carefully along the wall to avoid scuffing up the trace evidence on the pavement. His job was to translate all the swept dirt and kicked clutter into a description of what people had been doing while they made the mess. It was a bit of an art, his chosen career, and therefore most people who did his kind of work were held in a sort of awe by the rest of the general police force.

Lestrade had seen it done and been impressed a dozen times, but after being around a man who could spend five seconds looking at a scene and be able to tell you exactly what happened, who was involved, and a large amount of their personal histories, he'd always found forensic reconstruction a bit dull. Necessary, for those times when a certain tall, rude specter wasn't around to make their jobs easier and their feelings sorer, but still…dull.

"The way I see it, sir, there were two fights here," the specialist—his first name was Clive—said. No, he drawled. Lestrade shot him a look, noting to himself that he'd never seen a forensic look so laid back, confident, or…powerful.

The man wasn't Anderson, for certain. He was huge, for one thing, but not in plain size. It was his tall, muscled stature that did it, made his well-toned shoulders seem so very broad and his hard arms so very strong-looking. There was a sort of grace about him, too, a casual, assured lightness on his feet that Lestrade usually attributed to the over-capable physical trainers at the police academy. Especially the ones who delighted in beating the tar out of any harried, slightly-out-of-training Detective Inspector who happened to stroll across the tumbling mat. Altogether, the unusual physicality gave him the feel of a lion. An arrogant, challenging lion.

Brushing the bizarre thought off, the policeman raised an eyebrow and questioned, "Care to explain that to me, Barkley?"

With an easy nod, the man turned and walked Lestrade over to a large pile of wood, indicating a small space that had been cleared out of its far side. "Look here, under the window. The boards have been cleared away, and there are signs that some sort of mechanized equipment was here, tucked against the building. From the size and shape of the sawdust patterns on the pavement, it was about yay big," he outlined a smallish box shape in the air with his hands, "and someone found it and took it apart using this."

Holding up an evidence bag, he held it so that Lestrade could see the small piece of twisted, heavy-gauge wire inside. "I found it tucked out of sight and wiped, clean, in case you were wondering. Once that was done, its components set down here, and here, and here," the man went on, pointing at places on the ground where sawdust had fallen and outlined several oddly-shaped pieces and parts. Looking over at him, Barkley supplied, "I won't know what any of it was until some tests come back, but whoever was doing all this was snuck up on from behind."

Turning, he gestured to several indistinguishable marks on the ground that Lestrade didn't even try to make sense of. "Shoe size of Mr. Big puts him at well over six feet and his stride would equate to someone over a _meter_ wide at the hips," Barkley diagnosed. "The person here, we'll call him Tall, since his stride and foot size have him standing at over six feet as well, was kneeling. When Big came up behind him, Tall stood up and then went stumbling backwards and knocked these boards around. That's probably what shook up enough sawdust to leave those outlines."

Lestrade watched with a growing feeling of fascination as Barkley kept on, warming up to his subject and becoming much more animated. He'd started moving, stepping delicately around the evidence that only he could see while revitalizing the immediate past with his words and wild hand gestures. It seemed like he was having fun; the hungry lion aura had evaporated, and he'd started to smile. Although Lestrade had to admit, it was something of an eerie smile: lots of teeth, a bit of dark humor, and excitement that seemed a little too exuberant gleaming in the man's shielded eyes.

"So Tall goes a-tumbling. We'll assume he was punched by Big. Sawdust shows him at the wall, Big comes forward, but then Tall darts around him this way and spins on one foot. Big goes down on his knees and probably takes a kick to the face, judging by this blood splatter. Then he's up again, and Tall's backtracking."

Barkley paused as he shared that, shooting Lestrade an apologetic look from his position standing in the center of the alley. The Detective Inspector didn't even think of holding the man responsible for whatever he was about to say sorry for. He was still trying to figure out how Barkley had gotten to where he was when Lestrade was certain that he'd just been standing right beside him.

Showing no sign of whether or not he saw his boss's confusion, Barkley confessed, "It gets a little muddled out here in the middle, sir, since more people were moving around later. I can't tell you exactly what went on, but the amount of blood says that they were here a while. Otherwise, it's all pretty blurred over. I think that Big walked over this way, towards the bins. His nosebleed left a trail."

Lestrade followed the man with his eyes as Barkley walked a parallel path to the nearly invisible one that he saw on the ground, explaining as he went, "When I first saw it, I thought that Tall's tracks had been swept away. He'd just disappeared. Then I saw these bins." He paused, surveying the pile of toppled metal. Some of the containers had hefty dents in their sides. Almost absently, he remarked, "Big has quite an arm."

Lestrade's steadily-rising eyebrows had reached their high water mark. Feeling the scrunch in his forehead, he suddenly found himself recalling that the last person who had managed to make him so surprised was popularly believed to be a psychopath.

"Er, wait a minute," he interrupted, sidling over to the forensic and deliberately tiptoeing his way around the odd thought. "Are…are you saying that this poor bastard was _thrown_ into the bins?" He used his finger to highlight a rudimentary arch of trajectory. "From _here_ to…_there_?"

Barkley nodded matter-of-factly. "Yep. We've got some blood here; not much, just what you'd expect from scraped knees, a few minor cuts. After he'd thrown Tall, though, then Big came over. They rolled around a bit—got a decent amount of blood out of it. Somebody rolled over this way, but then he left the ground again—since he's been thrown already, my guess is that it was Tall—and he ends up against the wall over here. It's pretty much over for him after that."

Lestrade frowned. "You mean Big was the winner?"

Barkley smiled faintly. "Not necessarily."

Crossing his arms, the DI shook his head and told him flatly, "Then finish up. Who walked out of here, Big or…" he gritted his teeth, feeling ridiculous, "Tall?"

"Neither." Barkley was definitely grinning at that. Before Lestrade could open his mouth to demand a straight answer, the forensic turned back to the wall, holding his hands out to indicate a person of above-average height standing there. "Big picked up Tall here, held him against the wall. There's blood up here, from Tall's head, probably. The only reason why you aren't dealing with his body right now is because somebody else came along and helped him out."

Now, that was something that the Detective Inspector could work with. Perking up, he took a step towards the forensic specialist, demanding, "Who?"

Barkley shrugged, still grinning. "Little guy. Smaller feet, shorter stride, had mud on his shoes." Half-turning, he gestured back towards the mouth of the alley. "He came from the right, which leads to the front of these houses on Baker Street. Stopped a few feet in, then started running, swinging by the wood pile as he went." Looking back to the two intangible men grappling against the wall, he got a funny gleam in his eye. "He came over here, behind Big. Then Big's nosebleed ends up right against the ground and half of a broken board ends up here on the ground. I say Tiny used it to soften Big's skull. That's why Big crawled over here and pulled himself up with the window ledge—See the blood?—before he charged the newcomer. Who, by the way, dodged and dropped him."

For some reason, Lestrade didn't like that Barkley was calling the third man "Tiny." He opened his mouth, intending to set the man straight, but he stopped himself when he realized what he was going to say. _John Watson isn't that small_. Was that who he thought the last man was, then? John? Mild-mannered, reticent, humble John, who always had a warm look ready to blunt Sherlock's razor-edged comments and a stern tone waiting to remind his flatmate of his neglected manners?

It was. Sighing, the Detective Inspector looked down at the ground where Barkley had said Big—he felt like a schoolboy, using code names like Big, Tall, and…Tiny—fell for good, ordering his thoughts. John. Lestrade wondered at himself. For some reason, he thought it perfectly logical that John was capable of taking down a man almost twice his size, who'd already put Sherlock out of commission.

Because that was who Tall had to be, if John was his rescuer. The aloof, unapproachable (tall) detective was never without his constant, paradoxically light-giving shadow. If anyone was to gain John's assistance in a fight, it would be him.

And if Lestrade's gut told him right, John could handle himself in one _hell_ of a fight.

Looking up automatically as he processed that thought, Lestrade asked the waiting forensic, "So, where did all the bullets come from, then?" Catching sight of Sally waiting impatiently by the car as another forensic popped the hood, he added quickly, "And sorry, mate, but you'd better make this one quick."

Barkley looked disappointed, but he did speed it up, opting to move to the middle of the alley and point around himself rather than walk through the whole scene. Glancing at the place near the wall where he'd 'left' Sherlock, he began, "Well, Tiny—"

"Let's just call him Smaller," Lestrade suggested, wondering why he was playing along with such a ludicrous method of identification.

Raising an eyebrow and nodding, Barkley began anew. "Smaller went over and helped Tall inside. The car pulled up, two men got out of the back seat and walked over to where Big was laying, started to pick him up. I put them both at six feet as well. Smaller's footprints show up near the doorway, Big ends up on the ground as the two men turn, and then there's bullets. Lots of them."

Glancing in the direction of Mrs. Hudson's bullet-riddled walls, he noted, "Most ended up all around the doorway, which Smaller was hiding in. Eventually, one guy carried Big to the car while the other covered Smaller for him. Smaller stepped out twice from shelter. One time, the man with Big on his back dropped his gun—we found it with a bullet hole in its side and blood on it. Smaller shot it out of his hand. The second time, when Mr. No-Gun was closer to the car, he shot out both left-side tires and into the front of the vehicle, and No-Gun hit the pavement with Big. After that, two more men got out of the car, and all of the people here ran out the left of the alley with Smaller bringing up the rear."

Looking away from the mouth of the alley, he pointed to the doorway of 221 again. "Tall came out after that, wearing shoes, and went to the car. Then Smaller came back, stood by him for a while, went over to the woodpile, went with Tall to the driver's side, and then they both went back into the building."

Well, he had said to speed it up, hadn't he? Wishing that he'd thought to pull out the notebook that he kept with him for when he had to deal with Sherlock's super-fast deductions, Lestrade told himself to just read it all in the report and nodded at the forensic specialist, offering him a tired, "Thanks."

Turning, he walked quickly and carefully back towards the end of the alley. His damage control instinct was on high alert. Donovan was leaning over the technician's shoulder with an expression that made her look like she belonged in between some nice, sturdy iron bars, not putting other people behind them, and Anderson had yet to return from his scone-replacing, self-effacing mission. Lestrade sighed inwardly. As usual, he'd left his people alone for five minutes, and they were already misbehaving. Between them and Sherlock, he might as well be earning a salary for being the Yard's harassed babysitter.

Striding up on the technician's open side, he caught Sally's eye over his bent back and gave her a cautioning look. He was half surprised that she listened and reigned herself in; the scowl dampened back into the normal realms of unhappiness. She was actually a nice woman, Sally. Proud and stubborn, but a great cop and an excellent friend when she decided that she liked someone. Unfortunately, she had determined from their first meeting that she did _not_ like Sherlock.

Though Lestrade was actually rather fond of both Baker Street's male inhabitants, he could almost sympathize with Donovan's vexation. Just being around the detective's house was bad enough; to have a crime scene and a note of mockery left for the police to clean up while Sherlock and John went skipping off to the country was making his sergeant see red. Lestrade told himself that he should probably keep her distracted from any opportunities for vandalism until it was time to leave.

Glancing down at the tech, he surveyed the wreckage of the engine and asked him sideways, "So, where'd the bullet go?"

At that, the man between the two homicide detectives let out a small, disbelieving, almost nervous laugh. With a hesitant look at Donovan that he hastily disguised as a check for approval, he got his nod and pointed down into the depths of metal and machinery. "It's small caliber handgun ammunition, and it's right here, sir. It entered through the left side panel, that hole on your right there and embedded itself in this fuse box."

Something in his tone told the Detective Inspector that there was more. There was something about fuse boxes, some tidbit of auto care information that his tired brain was simply not up to rooting out amongst all his other disorganized knowledge. It was the two hours' sleep, no breakfast, and no coffee days that really made Sherlock's computer-like mental system look impressive. Resisting the unprofessional urge to scrub his face with his hands, Lestrade settled for an extra-weary blink and looked at the wreckage of the engine component that the technician had highlighted.

Hoping that the explanation wouldn't be too obvious or make him feel especially stupid, he instructed the man, "Tell me what that means."

The tech nodded, his expression thankfully devoid of condescension. Tapping the casing of the fuse box with the long examining rod that he had been using to search the evidence, he divulged, "The fuse box is used for the ignition. Without it, it's impossible to start the car. If it wasn't idling when whoever it was made this shot—which it wasn't, by the way—then the driver couldn't get it to turn on in order to drive off."

"So the shooter took it out on purpose," Sally interjected.

"Well, I doubt that." The man sandwiched between her and her boss shrugged, bumping them both and muttering a quick apology before he continued, "Look at the angle of entry here for the bullet. The path that it needed to take in order to reach the fuse box involved going between multiple places where there was only and inch's clearance to either side and hitting its target at exactly the right spot to disable the ignition completely. To make that shot on purpose, whoever it was had to have an intimate knowledge of this model's engine layout and the best damn skills with a handgun that I've ever seen."

He made as if to shrug again, then stopped himself before jostling those around him once more and concluded rather stiffly, "It's more likely that whoever it was shooting has been watching too much telly. He was probably trying to make the whole thing blow up like in the movies and got lucky."

He sounded very sure of himself, and Sally was nodding right along with him, obviously in accord. They shared twin looks of dismissal and scorn in regards to the unknown marksman; the Detective Inspector made a note to make sure that Anderson stopped rubbing off on his fellow police people. Giving the technician a curt nod of thanks—he might not agree with him, per se, but he was still a man who upheld professional courtesy—Lestrade looked away from their close-mindedness.

He gave one last look to the evidence, tracing the trajectory of the impossible bullet with his eyes. The technician had one thing right—for a normal man to make that kind of a shot, he had to be incredibly, stupidly lucky. But then, he didn't exactly suspect a normal man, did he? Shaking his head, Lestrade stepped back and walked away, going around the outside of the vehicle and sending a cursory glance in the driver's open door as he passed. Wiped clean, all evidence removed. Probably everything of empirical consequence had already been discovered and devoured by a certain thin, energetic detective he knew, whose conclusions had subsequently led him to drag his flatmate and friend off into who knows where for the sake of the case.

That thought, and the irritation that it and its kind usually brought with it, didn't quite take hold in the Detective Inspector's mind. Not yet, anyway. He was still thinking of the fuse box, preoccupied by the precision of the four shots that John had made, the only ones with different ammunition from that majority that had been discovered thus far. Not only had John disabled the car, he remembered, he'd shot a gun out of a man's hand. Out of a man's _hand_. That sort of skill was above and beyond what he'd been expecting from a discharged officer of the RAMC. _Far_ above, and _miles_ beyond.

John hadn't just gotten 'lucky,' the policeman thought as he strode over to a small huddle of forensic officers to collar Anderson with his bloody _platter_ of scones and personally escort him back into Baker Street. Thinking back to the strategic, definitely purposeful wreckage of the engine and ignoring his coworker's stammered objections as he grabbed the plate of pastries unforgivingly out of Anderson's grasping hands, he heard a quiet, sure voice in his head say the truth.

_John Watson makes his own luck_.


	10. Chapter 9

**I have absolutely no excuse for how late this is. Actually, I do, but none of my possible explanations are impersonal enough to tell you. So, I think I'll settle with I'M SO SORRY. I'M SORRY, I'M SORRY, I'M SORRY, SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY!**

**...words look really weird if you repeat them enough.**

**Anyway.**

**I hope you like!**

**Disclaimer—****_none of this is mine!  
_****Okay, well, a wee bit of it may be mine… (Blood, Sweat, and Tears included) but all of the good stuff definitely belongs to Doyle, Moffat, and Gatiss. I thank them greatly.**

* * *

They arrived in Kittsridge, Gloucestershire at one AM, after getting off the last train at Gloucester, hiring a car, and driving for two hours. A mid-train ride internet search had turned up a surprisingly accommodating Bed & Breakfast on the edge of the town—one that made a point of welcoming guests at any time of day with a cheery messaged on its website. Sherlock and John couldn't wait to get checked in, though of course their enthusiasm stemmed from remarkably different reasons.

The detective had made sure to bring along a small black valise, the contents of which were unknown to John. It was the only thing he'd bothered to help pack, and he'd done so in complete secrecy. Judging from the heft of it and the sounds that issued from within when the doctor had been instructed to carry it, though, John suspected that it contained the tools necessary for the type of nighttime exploits that Lestrade would have a hard time turning a blind eye to. How Sherlock expected to gad about with a set of lock picks when his hands were immobile, the blond man didn't know; still, the purported plans for nocturnal investigating explained his eagerness to reach Kittsridge before sunrise.

John, for his part, felt dead on his feet. Even the prospect of gathering their things out of the car and making the trip to whatever bed he would be using that night seemed overwhelming. He'd had spotty naps at best in the past days, and there had been no opportunity to sleep on the drive—not with Sherlock pushing the vehicle to speeds that the doctor didn't even _want_ to think about. It was a miracle that they hadn't been killed, or at the very least pulled over, even once during the trip. About a mile out of Gloucester, it had gotten to the point that John had begun to pray for a busier road to come along.

He wasn't just pining for London. Sherlock's infrequent concessions to the law only seemed to happen when there was traffic in the area; he'd just barely managed to keep them out of trouble with his selective law breaking. As soon as whatever car that he'd slowed down for was out of sight, though, he was back to testing how hard he needed to press on the accelerator in order to shove it all the way through the floor. The only time that the speedometer saw the underside of 130 was during a brief interlude near Coleford and while they were going around whatever small hamlets they came across, interspersed randomly amongst the hills.

Non-driver or not, John couldn't help but notice certain deficiencies in his flatmate's technique. "Sherlock, you're going over 160 kilometers per hour. Slow down! No, the needle's supposed to go in the other direction, nitwit, now you're speeding up. Haven't you ever—_Jesus_, Sherlock, brake before you turn!"

Buckled tightly into his seat and gripping the overhead handle until his knuckles turned white, John forgot about trying to rest. After a while, he even stopped mentally griping about never needing an auto license for himself in the army _(At least the drivers there were sane. Even a bugger voluntarily piloting a military vehicle in IED and roadside-bomb-heavy territory could be expected to try to keep his bloody passengers alive…)._ With Sherlock at the wheel, his focus seemed much better deserved by the simple process of staying seated and refraining from ripping the handle out of the ceiling.

"John, the seatbelt is not going to strangle you where you sit. Stop shoving yourself backwards so forcefully. At this rate, you'll be sitting in the back seat by the time we reach our destination."

"The seatbelt is _not_ what I'm worried about, Sherlock!"

At last, the lights of the town they sought twinkled up ahead, and Sherlock began to slow down. The snail's pace at which he toured the village was like watching paint dry compared to his previous speeds, to John's delight. Inwardly, the tense doctor sent fervent thanks for the respite to whichever supernatural ear that felt like listening. With fearing for their lives out of the way, there was enough space in his brain for him to host a small moment of self-chastisement. He was partly at fault for his reaction to the harried ride, after all. Foolishly, he hadn't considered what getting into a car with a driver who completely lacked common sense could mean for his stress levels. Thanks to his lack of mental preparation, his shoulders would be tense for a week.

Forcing himself to release his death grip on the overhead handle, John slid down into a more natural position in the passenger seat and closed his eyes. There was a distinct tremble in his muscles from the strain of being rigid so long, one that he had learned to relish after a lifetime of being active and pushing himself to his limits. Half due to the familiar sensation and half due to his natural reaction to the man sitting next to him, he smiled a bit on reflex as he inquired of his flatmate, "How the _Hell_ did you get a driver's license?"

Sherlock's lips quirked upwards at the corner in his version of a grin. In keeping with the mischief glittering in his silver eyes, his deep voice held an undercurrent of dark amusement as he mentioned, "I had Mycroft teach me."

"Christ," John exclaimed weakly, flinching at the mere idea. Suddenly, he was overcome by a mental picture of the Holmes brothers in a car going 160 kilometers per hour through the countryside, both trying to pilot the vehicle at once while they argued about the proper technique for lane changing. He cringed again and shuddered out, "_You_ asked _him_ for driving lessons?"

There was no hiding the humor in Sherlock's baritone any longer. "No." He glanced over to see that John was already smiling slightly in reaction to the hilarity his tone promised, slumped back against his seat with his eyes closed and only the upward turn of his lips to redeem his expression from looking exhausted. "I asked him about the best way to scare the local instructor into signing my permit."

At that, John opened his eyes and sat up straighter, looking at his friend with a crooked grin. "Couldn't just threaten to have the man sacked if he didn't?"

Sherlock hummed a negative, smirking devilishly as—mercifully, for perhaps the first time on that trip, even—he turned his eyes to the road and kept them there. "Well, handling the intimidation myself was more intriguing at that point, and, as he was only two years out of Primary School, Mycroft had yet to gain the official position or means necessary to threaten the man's livelihood."

There was no holding it off any longer; John burst into gales of laughter, clutching his stomach and curling over with the sound of his companion's accompanying mirth ringing in his ears. He imagined that he should be feeling sorry for the poor man who had found himself at the mercy of his flatmate's younger self, but he recalled the burly, crass older gentleman who'd been in charge of his local driving tests: a man who he had put off seeing until he was off to Uni and no longer had the option of encountering. Then he thought of an eleven-year-old Sherlock bullying the blighter, and it was just too much. Though he tried, he couldn't quite summon up the resolve to quiet his giggles. He good-naturedly blamed Sherlock. As with their inappropriate banter and snickering at crime scenes, he was powerless to keep from responding to the peculiar streak of humor that the lanky brunette brought out in him.

John's snickers were just quieting as Sherlock rolled the car to a stop in the center square of the tiny, darkened settlement. Still smiling hugely and trying not to look at each other in the hopes of avoiding another manic episode, the two men looked around. Kittsridge wasn't just a small town—it was barely a village. Glancing about, John couldn't help but feel like he stood out already, an outsider even when none of the local inhabitants were there to point and stare. The internet had told them to expect almost five hundred new faces, but he'd be impressed if there were over three hundred people living there. The rest had to be in outlying estates and farms; Kittsridge just didn't seem big enough to hold that many citizens.

Everything about the place said "quaint country village." The common in the center was a large square of grass, a hill that had been cut down on all sides and shored off by rough stone walls, sidewalks bordering each of them. From there, four main streets stretched out from each side of the square, with smaller lanes going off from each corner. In the distance, at the end of each of the eight streets that he could see, John picked out empty road and barren country, the borders of the town close and definite.

There was a park atop the common's sloped grass, complete with ancient swings that creaked as they swung in the faint breeze and a slide that looked rickety enough to blow over at any second. The houses were all clustered close together around the square, leaning against one another for support and huddled against the wind. There wasn't an inner light on in sight, and only a few buildings looked to be of the non-residence sort. The few signs of life came from the moths circling the streetlights high overhead and a single, flickering neon sign for a tavern at the end of the street to their right.

And that was it. Kittsridge, in all its glory. Raising an eyebrow, John surveyed the town's meager prospects, wondering how it was even big enough to merit a bar. It was nigh on closing time, but he doubted that anyone around this town would be awake enough to get thrown out. He couldn't see in its front windows from the angle where they sat, but he'd be surprised if there was much in the way of a good, rowdy business going on behind its plain clapboard walls. Then again, it could be that there was a gang of gun-toting, black-car-driving, bomber-kidnapping thugs patronizing the area.

"Well, at least it'll be easy for us to spot a familiar face," he remarked to the tall shadow sitting in the driver's seat. The faces of the four mystery men and Max were in his mind, burned into his recall for future reference. Of course, they weren't quite alone…

At the comment, his mind was irresistibly pulled to Ness, with her small, oddly-clothed build and unassuming looks. For maybe the thousandth time that evening, he wondered if she was all right and hoped that she would be there in the town where they arrived. Not only would Sherlock be impossibly, amazingly right—again—but the doctor would get a chance to make sure that his unofficial patient was doing well.

Even if she wasn't working at the tavern like Sherlock said she was, he still hoped to find her. He'd recognize her in a town of four thousand without a second blink, he was certain, but at least Kittsridge's tiny population would speed up his finding of her. On the train, he'd managed to coax an explanation about her from Sherlock, using a time-honored tactic. Taking of advantage of some sort of activity going on nearby that Sherlock despised (say, other passenger's overzealous interest in having a conversation with him), he would send his friend a look with the following probe: "Well, is my interfering worth…(insert desired action here)?"

Almost invariably, it was. The train ride had been no exception; about halfway through, Sherlock had run out of passengers to deduce. The nearest couple of strangers, an elderly matron and the younger woman accompanying her—niece, trying to garner favor with the dowager before she expired in order to get a better turnout in the will, Sherlock had muttered to him—were taking turns being invasive. The old lady could wax eloquent on any number of mundane, eye-rolling topics, and in the times when she paused for breath her companion alternated between gushing enthusiasm for whatever Sherlock said and furiously batting her eyelashes and flaunting her cleavage.

After half an hour of that, even John had to admit that the two of them were enough to drive a saint mad. Making up some vague sort of excuse about a headache-inducing medical condition that needed total quiet, he persuaded the women to relocate farther down the train car, bringing a blessed bubble of silence into their orbit. Sherlock exhaled in relief and slumped down in his seat, sliding so far forward that his heels touched the opposite backrest when he rudely propped them up on the women's vacated seat.

He couldn't stand the lack of activity for long, though. Waiting just long enough for him to sink into a good pout, John had brought up Ness. And had immediately been shot down, as Sherlock had already deduced her earlier that day. She was too boring. But John was persistent, not to mention still a little pissed about the Sarah incident, and after another thirty minutes of the silent treatment, the detective had caved in to his hard look.

"Fine," he'd grumbled thickly through his swollen lip. He had managed to figure out how to speak clearly, and the collar of his signature coat was pulled up as high as it would go to hide his telling infirmity. "I'll talk about the _girl_."

"Ness," John had corrected him pointedly, reminding Sherlock once again that people who were not corpses at a crime scene or involved in a case at least deserved to be called by their names.

True, he'd long before given up on getting his friend to use proper nouns if he didn't feel like it. The social sphere of Sherlock's life may have been entrusted to him, but a sociopath (even a self-pronounced one) was at times inescapably a sociopath. When John was not willing to devote all of his energy to fixing a problem lest he lose ground on a separate issue in their…friendship, partnership (the non-romantic kind!), bond, relationship, symbiosis—_whatever_ the thing was between them—Sherlock's mentality all but ruled. Yet, something about Ness, be it her unseen injuries or that air of mystery about her, had struck a chord with him. Futile or not, he felt protective of her. That was why he was fishing information about her out of Sherlock in the first place.

Since he had yet to prove that he was truly telepathic, Sherlock missed the specifics of John's internal dialogue and settled on sending a mildly reproachful glare his way, which John shrugged off without a blink, staring right back. His life before Sherlock had hardly prepared him to deal with tempestuous consulting detectives, but at least he'd had plenty of experience in staring down glares. If the personnel records of people in his command were anything to go by, he'd all but mastered the art of dealing with hostiles who were supposed to be friendly. Sherlock had proven to be more stubborn than even the most aggressive of the muscle-bound soldiers that John had quieted, but the doctor was a patient man.

He wasn't out to tame, only to temper. Sherlock made a fine blade, all razor wit and glittering intellect honed into his thin-yet-unyielding form, but even the best of tools needed to undergo a stabilizing process. John didn't possess an ego big enough to allow him to think that he could be the one to fashion Sherlock Holmes into a true warrior's touchstone, but _somebody_ had to start in on him, if only to remind those better suited to the task that it could be done.

And, since he was getting rather stunningly sidetracked, perhaps somebody should remind _him_ that he had better things to be doing than daydreaming. Snapping his focus back to the present, the doctor kept up his stare-down. It wasn't the least bit aggressive; with Sherlock, that sort of approach wasn't needed. It was just a patient, implacable, slightly chiding look that he had perfected back home when he had to deal with his budding alcoholic, lesbian, teenaged older sister. It had seldom let him down.

Eventually, as John had known it would, the brunette's silver gaze unfocused slightly and turned inwards. The blond man hid his smile by scrubbing his face wearily with his left hand—tremor free as long as he was around Sherlock—which served to remind him that he actually was very tired. The drained motion became genuine, and he repeated it automatically to try and wake himself up a little. Sherlock didn't see it, anyway; the lure of the puzzle and the attraction of an attentive ear had proved too strong for his affronted pose to withstand. Not bothering to straighten up out of his slouch, the detective clasped his hands together in front of his face, pressing his fingers into each other precisely at their tips so that he looked like he was praying. It was his thinking pose. He was giving the matter some serious consideration.

Sensing victory, John sat forward in his seat. He was sitting Sherlock, but since their annoying neighbors had moved on and the train was empty enough for them to take up two facing benches, he moved to sit across from him. Custom-shoe-clad feet bumping his leg aside, he much preferred that position. It allowed him the perfect vantage point to watch his friend's silver-green irises flicker in contemplation.

When Sherlock was truly focusing on something, he would often venture into his Mind Palace, a mental locality that seemed to shift and dance in front of his eyes like an interactive computer program. If the small gestures and mutterings that occurred when he went there were any indication, the place was as vast and quick and malleable as the mind that created it; something always seemed to be moving there, as demonstrated by the echoing motion in Sherlock's hands, lips, and eyes.

John had been around his friend long enough to recognize the signs of true absorption as opposed to mere "stretching" exercises. The most impossible problems garnered a small whirlwind of energy and repressed gesticulation from the man opposite him; Sherlock's intensity would all but radiate off of him if he was excited enough. There on the train, however, John took in his flatmate's sprawling legs, pensive hands, and gleaming eyes with a practiced eye and sighed inwardly.

Sherlock wasn't within miles of his Mind Palace, the doctor could tell. Ness's dissection didn't even rate high enough to bring him past the intangible institution's doorstep. As happened often enough around the lanky brunette, the blond man felt a glimmer of fond exasperation for his incredible friend. The man could hardly be bothered to exert himself on the woman's behalf, but John knew to expect seemingly miraculous conclusions from him anyway.

_I'm just lucky that he's so bloody_ bored, he reflected. Otherwise he would have undoubtedly been forced to pay a far steeper price to gain the knowledge he sought. A jumper donated to science, perhaps, or a promise to let the experiment with the goat's hooves in the microwave alone for a week. The possibilities made him shudder. He was glad he hadn't considered that line of thought before; it would have shown on his face and given Sherlock ideas.

His train of thought was interrupted as the silver beacons of Sherlock's gaze flitted over to rest on his face. In a measured voice that did nothing to disguise the glittering eagerness in his eyes, Sherlock asked demurely, "What would you like to know?"

Success. But the question gave the blond man pause. There was so much about Ness that simply existed as one big question mark to him. He worried about her health, certainly, but Sherlock could unlikely give him more data on that than the little he already had. Not to mention, as a doctor he'd probably done as thorough a job diagnosing her as could be done with the exposure he'd had already. Wondering if she was healthy wasn't the only question that he had about her, anyway. What did he _want_ to know? A great deal, he realized when he thought about it.

"Um…"

Why did she dress the way she did—did her family really hate her? Who had owned the army boots that she wore? Why was she so undernourished and short of sleep? Was her hair supposed to be so oddly cut? How had she learned to be so in control of herself? What had been in the text message that had frightened her so much? It had to be more than a missed appointment or something, hadn't it?

"You want to know everything, naturally," Sherlock stated into the brief silence. He rolled his eyes, swiftly taking the decision about what to say out of John's hands as his patience wore out. Crossing his arms and slouching further down into his seat, he flicked his eyes out the darkened windows of the train and questioned, sounding utterly bored, "You at least remember what I've told you so far?"

"She's a 'governess and girl of all work for a public house in west Gloucestershire,' " John quoted, recalling their conversation in Sherlock's bedroom. Which they'd had while he pulled the detective out from under a _coffin_. He had yet to figure out why the ruddy thing was in the flat in the first place, he realized. He filed the question away for later.

Taking John's recitation as satisfactory, Sherlock nodded slightly and continued to stare out the window. His silver eyes were watching anything but the scenery by then, however, and his voice was as intense as ever when he began speaking in his smoothest, fastest 'deduction speed.'

"Well, then, to what I told you: the governess part was simple enough. There was a faded drawing on the back of her right hand: a rather insipid bunny rabbit in blue marker. She's right-handed, so the poor quality of dear little 'bluebell' could be due to a laughable attempt to draw an upside-down blue rabbit with her left hand." His snide tone of voice showed how likely he thought that option to be. "However, accompanied by the garish plastic letter beads spelling out MISS NESS that were attached to the keychain on her belt loop, the mark of children is more than evident."

John wanted to open his mouth to interject, but he sensed that Sherlock was far from finished. Furthermore, he knew that there was little need for him to speak his worries aloud around his friend in order for them to be heard.

Catching sight his flatmate's questioning expression, the detective elaborated, "But wait, you say, how is she a governess? Couldn't they be her own children? Unlikely, seeing as she was still wearing an antique chastity ring—likely from a deceased female relative who actually fancied her company—and that the fine motor skills required for an adolescent to attempt the origami in her pocket would belong to at least a thirteen-year-old, putting her approximate age for the birth at fifteen. Then there's still the trouble of job title, of course. Couldn't a sitter or a sister receive such darling presents as a washable body tattoo, an altogether _whimsical_ paper crane, and the would-be bracelet that was too long and ugly to be anything but a cumbersome accessory?"

He was talking to himself again, arguing and answering his own questions. Grinning crookedly, John sat back and let him have at it, his eyes twinkling as he watched the detective stage an entire crime scene in his head, complete with Donovan and Anderson's characters to ask the stupid questions so he could refute them. There was no stopping him once he started handling entire conversations himself.

Sherlock ignored John's entertainment, not breaking the flow of his monologue in the slightest as his eyes darted over to note his flatmate's smile and promptly rolled heavenward in response. "Yes, fine, maybe, but the beads spell out MISS NESS, a title that would hardly be assigned to a mother or a close member of the family. Moreover, it's improbable that she could have gotten ink from cheap Year 2 schoolbooks stained on her fingers if she were not a governess—family study time? No. Her family hates her, and she spends most of her time working. Not to mention that she has clearly been living in the company of two older people, serving a rowdy group of drinkers, and shows no signs of spending more than part of the day with people younger than her."

"Because she's working in the public house—" the old term felt strange as it rolled off his tongue— "the bar in West Gloucestershire?" John managed to ask in the brief pause Sherlock took between topics.

Sherlock rolled his eyes. "Obviously, yes. As I said, she's been around heavy drinkers, but likely hasn't touched a drop herself in years, if ever. Her jacket smells faintly of cigarettes, but she doesn't smoke. Furthermore, she has the stance of a laborer, the fingernails of a painter, and her left thumb shows exactly how many tables she's bussed in the when she takes a break from the Bed and Breakfast to work the tavern."

"There's a Bed and Breakfast now, too?" John was actually rather proud that he'd managed to keep up with Sherlock through his entire explanation so far.

Sherlock sighed mournfully at his bemusement. "Yes. Obviously. The one we're going to, in fact. Likely that is where she tends to her pupils during the day while helping out with the odd chore around the establishment. The paint and posture puts her outdoors, but she's been routinely doing laundry and using an inordinate amount of cleaning supplies as well. Taking for granted that maintaining a personal household with that amount of diligence would classify either her or her taskmaster as mentally disturbed and she shows no signs of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, then the next likely place for her to use the cleaning materials would be at a hospitality business."

John shook his head in wonder. "Fantastic."

_Amazing_. It had been the first compliment that he had ever given his flatmate, back in that first cab ride to the crime scene of _A Study in Pink_. The unlikely, bizarre, and surely mad thing about John Watson was that when he said things like that, he was completely sincere. John had called Sherlock brilliant; he still remembered the look of surprise on the man's face as his authentic praise sank in. Just thinking of the show that had precipitated it, he became awed all over again. Sure, Sherlock's deductions could be harsh and uncomfortable in content, but the inhuman intelligence that they displayed would never cease to fill him with admiration.

The crunch of tires on poorly maintained asphalt jolted the doctor from his reverie. With the sensation that he'd been plucked up from one companionable place and dropped into another, he straightened up in the passenger seat of the hired car and got his bearings. Sherlock had turned down one of the streets that sprang diagonally off of Kittsridge's main square. The route brought them past rows of quiet, shuttered houses that were backed up to the buildings on the adjacent, perpendicular streets.

Buildings like _Dawson's Public House_—_Dawson's Pub_ in short—for instance.

Sherlock pulled up to the curb and got out, shutting the door behind him with an impossibly quiet click. John hurriedly unclipped his seatbelt and clambered out after him. Before he had fully disembarked, the taller man was gone, flitting into the shadows between two cottages. John flinched at the noise that his door made as it closed and trotted over to the wall of blackness where his friend had disappeared. It was a lane, a narrow path that led between the houses to the alley behind.

He couldn't hear Sherlock's footsteps ahead of him. Not surprising: the man was a cat in the dark. Huffing out an unbothered sigh, John scuffed his way through the dark, choosing at random to turn left onto the intersecting alley and waiting for his eyes to adjust to the bright moon overhead. Then the back of Sherlock's shoulder interrupted his nose's forward progress, and he bit back a muttered curse. Mostly.

"Really, John." Sherlock's low tone was mildly reproving. Holding his nose, John sent a halfhearted glare up into the shadows where the murmured baritone had emanated from and kept quiet. Sherlock obviously thought the silence was an improvement, because he'd kept the note of reproach out of his words when he spoke again. "The rear of the pub is just ahead. You see the dim light? Its rear lamp is in pitiful condition; only one out of four bulbs."

Instantly, John perked up, dropping his hand from his face and craning his neck to see over Sherlock. Up ahead farther, a soft, yellow glow illuminated the pavement and peeked out from around another business's divider wall. It was so faint and he had been so distracted by trying not to stumble that he hadn't noticed it before. Stepping around his flatmate's lean frame, he muttered sideways, "Are we going in the back way, or just nosing about in the bins for clues?"

Sherlock scoffed derisively at his assumption. "Neither." Brushing forward, he allowed the sleeve of his Belstaff coat to brush against one of John's patched elbows, guiding the other man forward with the touch. "We're nosing in another sort of place entirely."

Well used to keeping pace with the taller man's longer strides, John let himself fall a half a step behind, his customary position when gadding about beside Sherlock Holmes. He no longer worried about where he was going, stepping lightly instead of feeling his way with cautious, heavy feet. Though he'd probably scoff at the notion if the doctor brought it up, Holmes was uncannily useful when one wanted to move expediently through the night. All one had to do was take note of where he went or didn't go and navigate accordingly.

That wasn't the only benefit the man had. For some inexplicable reason, when he was around Sherlock, John seemed to get wrapped up in his friend's presence—well, maybe that wasn't exactly _inexplicable_—so thoroughly entangled in the detective's larger-than-life persona that Sherlock's speed and energy and soundlessness extended to him, too. Moving, therefore, with an economy of movement that was only natural to him when in the company of a certain brunette, John suddenly found himself completely at ease and aware within the dark of the alley. The space between them and their quarry was swallowed in moments, and they rounded the corner of the partition wall noiselessly.

At once, several things came to his attention. First of all, they were in a tiny side-alley that branched off of the main one, just large enough to accommodate industrial-sized bins and a plethora of discarded junk. Second, Sherlock had been right about the pathetic state of the lamp—surprise, surprise—the solitary bulb was so far gone that it was sputtering, winking on and off spastically. Thirdly, and most importantly: they weren't alone.

There was another person in the alley with them; John got a vague impression of a slight, slender build, a pale face, and a light-colored jacket. The rest was blurred by startled motion as the woman—he was enough of a male to recognize that straightaway, at least—drew jerkily back from their appearance, retreating several steps back towards the shadows of the pub's rear door. It wasn't a far walk from where she had stood beside a rubbish heap.

A bit surprised himself, John faltered to a halt, his brow furrowing as he took in the half-obscured shape of the girl frozen before them. He'd seen her drop something when they'd startled her; he wondered distantly what the trash's new addition was in the back of his mind. Maybe they'd found out, once they'd explained their presence and apologized for frightening her.

Sherlock had no such compunctions. Drawing himself up like some haughty bird of prey, he swooped in on the short, still creature, his coat flaring out behind him like black wings. "Evening." His rich baritone held a dark, almost threatening undercurrent that had unknowingly knocked females off their heads too many times to count. "Just the woman I wanted to see. How _convenient_."

John knew for a fact that his friend had no idea how that sounded out of context. Anxious to keep him from doing too much unintentional damage, the blond man hurried forward, halting beside Sherlock's shoulder and searching the darkened, rigid countenance before him for features that he could identify as a face. "Sorry to bother you, miss," he interjected hurriedly into the silence that reigned after Sherlock's easily-misconstrued opening lines. "We were just looking for—"

"Oh."

John stopped talking immediately. As soon as he heard her utterance, he was distracted by the sight of the stiff shoulders before him relaxing as the woman lost her sense of alarm. The aura of tenseness about her completely evaporated, surprising him enough to chase off his train of thought. John wondered what had caused the change. Beside him, he felt Sherlock's posture make a minute adjustment as well, the only sign of his interest in the stranger's sudden about-face of demeanor.

The woman didn't appear to notice the tall man's gimlet gaze. Taking a step forward into the doctor's sudden pause, she greeted him in a soft, calm voice, "Hello, John."

Well, of all the things he'd been expecting to find in a dark alley in the small hours of the morning, _she_ definitely wasn't among them.

* * *

**It's occurred to me (actually, this has been bothering me from the beginning) that this story seems to be operating in no realistic timeline whatsoever. **

**I confess that my mind is nowhere near nimble enough to handle all of the little threads and details that I am ambitiously trying to write. Trying for continuity on top of it was just too painful to contemplate. So, I didn't. **

**If I did have to put a time on it, though, I guess it would have to be before Baskerville, since Sherlock drove in that one and John didn't look like he'd just survived a second war (meaning that he's somehow come up with a way to influence his friend's navigational preferences). But then, he also talks about being together for almost a year, and I have no idea how much time actually elapsed in the series before that episode...**


End file.
